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NOTES ON MY 
BOOKS 



NOTES ON MY BOOKS 



BY 
JOSEPH CONRAD 




GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
M C M X X I 









COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921, BT 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



m 2\ 1321 

©cuGii.v'ie 



Q^ 



NOTES ON MY 
BOOKS 



NOTES ON MY 
BOOKS 



"ALMAYERS FOLLY 

I AM informed that in criticizing that Hter- 
ature which preys on strange people and 
prowls in far-off countries, under the shade of 
palms, in the unsheltered glare of sunbeaten 
beaches, amongst honest cannibals and the 
more sophisticated pioneers of our glorious 
virtues, a lady — distinguished in the world of 
letters — summed up her disapproval of it by 
saying that the tales it produced were "de- 
civilized." And in that sentence not only 
the tales but, I apprehend, the strange people 
and the far-off countries also, are finally 
condemned in a verdict of contemptuous dis- 
like. 

A woman's judgment: intuitive, clever, ex- 
pressed with felicitous charm — ^infallible. A 
judgment that has nothing to do with justice. 
The critic and the judge seems to think that 
in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a 

[3] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly 
grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all 
problems is found in the barrel of a revolver 
or on the point of an assegai. And yet it is not 
so. But the erring magistrate may plead in 
excuse the misleading nature of the evidence. 

The picture of life, there as here, is drawn 
with the same elaboration of detail, coloured 
with the same tints. Only in the cruel 
serenity of the sky, under the merciless 
brilhance of the sun, the dazzled eye misses 
the delicate detail, sees only the strong out- 
lines, while the colours, in the steady light, 
seem crude and without shadow. Neverthe- 
less it is the same picture. 

And there is a bond between us and that 
humanity so far away. I am speaking here 
of men and women — not of the charming and 
graceful phantoms that move about in our 
mud and smoke and are softly luminous with 
the radiance of all our virtues; that are pos- 
sessed of all refinements, of all sensibihties, 
of all wisdom — ^but, being only phantoms, 
possess no heart. 

The sympathies of those are (probably) 
with the immortals: with the angels above 
or the devils below. I am content to sym- 

[4] 



'*AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS" 

pathize with common mortals, no matter 
where they Hve; in houses or in tents, in the 
streets under a fog, or in the forests behind 
the dark hne of dismal mangroves that fringe 
the vast solitude of the sea. For, their land — 
like ours — hes under the inscrutable eyes of 
the Most High. Their hearts — like ours — 
must endure the load of the gifts from Heaven: 
the curse of facts and the blessing of illusions, 
the bitterness of our wisdom and the deceptive 
consolation of our folly. 

J. C. 
1895. 



" An Outcast of the Islands " is my second 
novel in the absolute sense of the word ; second 
in conception, second in execution, second as 
it were in its essence. There was no hesita- 
tion, half-formed plan, vague idea, or the 
vaguest reverie of anything else between it 
and "Almayer's Folly." The only doubt I 
suffered from, after the publication of '*A1- 
mayer's Folly," was whether I should write 
another line for print. Those days, now 
grown so dim, had their poignant moments. 
Neither in my mind nor in my heart had I 

[5] 



AUTHOR^S NOTE TO 
then given up the sea. In truth I was cHng- 
ing to it desperately, all the more desperately 
because, against my will, I could not help 
feeling that there was something changed in 
my relation to it. "Almayer's Folly" had 
been finished and done with. The mood it- 
self was gone. But it had left the memory of 
an experience that, both in thought and 
emotion, was unconnected with the sea, and I 
suppose that part of my moral being which 
is rooted in consistency was badly shaken. 
I was a victim of contrary stresses which 
produced a state of immobility. I gave my- 
self up to indolence. Since it was impossible 
for me to face both ways I had elected to face 
nothing. The discovery of new values in life 
is a very chaotic experience; there is a tre- 
mendous amount of jostling and confusion and 
a momentary feeling of darkness. I let my 
spirit float supine over that chaos. 

A phrase of Edward Garnett's is, as a matter 
of fact, responsible for this book. The first 
of the friends I made for myself by my pen 
it was but natural that he should be the 
recipient, at that time, of my confidences. 
One evening when we had dined together and 
he had listened to the account of my per- 

[6] 



"AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS'^ 

plexities (I fear he must have been growing a 
Httle tired of them) he pointed out that there 
was no need to determine my future abso- 
lutely. Then he added: "You have the style, 
you have the temperament; why not write 
another?" I believe that as far as one man 
may wish to influence another man's life 
Edward Garnett had a great desire that I 
should go on writing. At that time, and I 
may say, ever afterwards, he was always very 
patient and gentle with me. What strikes me 
most, however, in the phrase quoted above 
which was off'ered to me in a tone of detach- 
ment is not its gentleness but its effective 
wisdom. Had he said, "Why not go on 
writing," it is very probable he would have 
scared me away from pen and ink for ever; 
but there was nothing either to frighten one or 
arouse one's antagonism in the mere sug- 
gestion to "write another." And thus a dead 
point in the revolution of my affairs was in- 
sidiously got over. The word "another" 
did it. At about eleven o'clock of a nice 
London night, Edward and I walked along 
interminable streets talking of many things, 
and I remember that on getting home I sat 
down and wrote about half a page of "An 

[7] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

Outcast of the Islands" before I slept. This 
was committing myself definitely, I won't say 
to another life, but to another book. There 
is apparently something in my character 
which will not allow me to abandon for good 
any piece of work I have begun. I have laid 
aside many beginnings. I have laid them 
aside with sorrow, with disgust, with rage, 
with melancholy and even with self-contempt ; 
but even at the worst I had an uneasy con- 
sciousness that I would have to go back to 
them. 

" An Outcast of the Islands" belongs to those 
novels of mine that were never laid aside; and 
though it brought me the qualification of 
"exotic writer" I don't think the charge was 
at all justified. For the life of me I don't see 
that there is the slightest exotic spirit in the 
conception or style of that novel. It is 
certainly the most tropical of my eastern tales. 
The mere scenery got a great hold on me as I 
went on, perhaps because (I may just as well 
confess that) the story itself was never very 
near my heart. It engaged my imagination 
much more than my affection. As to my 
feeling for Willems it was but the regard one 
cannot help having for one's own creation. 

[81 



♦'AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS" 

Obviously I could not be indifferent to a man 
on whose head I had brought so much evil 
simply by imagining him such as he appears 
in the novel — and that, too, on a very slight 
foundation. 

The man who suggested Willems to me was 
not particularly interesting in himself. My 
interest was aroused by his dependent posi- 
tion, his strange, dubious status of a mis- 
trusted, disliked, worn-out European living 
on the reluctant toleration of that Settlement 
hidden in the heart of the forest-land, up that 
sombre stream which our ship was the only 
white men's ship to visit. With his hollow, 
clean-shaved cheeks, a heavy grey moustache 
and eyes without any expression whatever, 
clad always in a spotless sleeping suit much 
befrogged in front, which left his lean neck 
wholly uncovered, and with his bare feet in a 
pair of straw slippers, he wandered silently 
amongst the houses in dayhght, almost as 
dumb as an animal and apparently much more 
homeless. I don't know what he did with 
himself at night. He must have had a place, 
a hut, a palm-leaf shed, some sort of hovel 
where he kept his razor and his change of 
sleeping suits. An air of futile mystery hung 

[9] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

over him, something not exactly dark but 
obviously ugly. The only definite statement 
I could extract from anybody was that it was 
he who had "brought the Arabs into the 
river." That must have happened many 
years before. But how did he bring them 
into the river.*^ He could hardly have done 
it in his arms like a lot of kittens. I knew 
that Almayer founded the chronology of all 
his misfortunes on the date of that fateful 
advent; and yet the very first time we dined 
with Almayer there was Willems sitting at 
table with us in the manner of the skeleton 
at the feast, obviously shunned by everybody, 
never addressed by any one, and for all recog- 
nition of his existence getting now and then 
from Almayer a venomous glance which I 
observed with great surprise. In the course 
of the whole evening he ventured one single 
remark which I didn't catch because his 
articulation was imperfect, as of a man who 
had forgotten how to speak. I was the only 
person who seemed aware of the sound. 
Willems subsided. Presently he retired, 
pointedly unnoticed — into the forest maybe .^ 
Its immensity was there, within three hun- 
dred yards of the verandah, ready to swallow 

FlOl 



"AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS" 

up anything. Almayer conversing with my 
captain did not stop talking while he glared 
angrily at the retreating back. Didn't that 
fellow bring the Arabs into the river! Never- 
theless Willems turned up next morning on 
Almayer 's verandah. From the bridge of the 
steamer I could see plainly these two, break- 
fasting together, tete a tete and, I suppose, in 
dead silence, one with his air of being no longer 
interested in this world and the other raising 
his eyes now and then with intense dislike. 

It was clear that in those days Willems lived 
on Almayer 's charity. Yet on returning two 
months later to Sambir I heard that he had 
gone on an expedition up the river in charge 
of a steam-launch belonging to the Arabs, 
to make some discovery or other. On ac- 
count of the strange reluctance that everyone 
manifested to talk about Willems it was im- 
possible for me to get at the rights of that 
transaction. Moreover, I was a newcomer, 
the youngest of the company, and, I suspect, 
not judged quite fit as yet for a full con- 
fidence. I was not much concerned about 
that exclusion. The faint suggestion of plots 
and mysteries pertaining to all matters touch- 
ing Almayer's affairs amused me vastly. Al- 

[11] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

mayer was obviously very much affected. I 
believe he missed Willems inmiensely. He 
wore an air of sinister preoccupation and 
talked confidentially with my captain. I 
could catch only snatches of mumbled sen- 
tences. Then one morning as I came along 
the deck to take my place at the breakfast 
table Almayer checked himself in his low- 
toned discourse. My captain's face was per- 
fectly impenetrable. There was a moment of 
profound silence and then as if unable to con- 
tain himself Almayer burst out in a loud 
vicious tone: 

"One thing's certain; if he finds anything 
worth having up there they will poison him Hke 
a dog." 

Disconnected though it was, that phrase, as 
food for thought, was distinctly worth hear- 
ing. We left the river three days afterwards 
and I never returned to Sambir; but what- 
ever happened to the protagonist of my 
Willems nobody can deny that I have re- 
corded for him a less squalid fate. 

J. C. 

1919. 



[12 



"NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS'" 

TO MY READERS IN AMERICA 

From that evening when James Wait joined 
the ship — ^late for the muster of the crew — 
to the moment when he left us in the open sea, 
shrouded in sailcloth, through the open port, 
I had much to do with him. He was in my 
watch. A negro in a British forecastle is a 
lonely being. He has no chums. Yet James 
Wait, afraid of death and making her his ac- 
complice, was an impostor of some character — 
mastering our compassion, scornful of our 
sentiment alism, triumphing over our sus- 
picions. 

But in the book he is nothing; he is merely 
the centre of the ship's collective psychology 
and the pivot of the action. Yet he, who in 
the family circle and amongst my friends is 
famiharly referred to as the Nigger, remains 
very precious to me. For the book written 
round him is not the sort of thing that can be 
attempted more than once in a life-time. It 
is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, 
but as an artist striving for the utmost sin- 
cerity of expression, I am willing to stand 
or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my un- 
alterable and profound affection for the ships, 

[13 1 "^ 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

the seamen, the winds and the great sea — the 
moulders of my youth, the companions of the 
best years of my hfe. 

After writing the last words of that book, in 
the revulsion of feehng before the accom- 
plished task, I understood that I had done 
with the sea, and that henceforth I had to be a 
writer. And almost without laying down 
the pen I wrote a preface, trying to express 
the spirit in which I was entering on the task 
of my new life. That preface on advice 
(which I now think was wrong) was never 
published with the book. But the late W. 
E. Henley, who had the courage at that time 
(1897) to serialize my "Nigger" in the New 
Review judged it worthy to be printed as an 
afterword at the end of the last instalment of 
the tale. 

I am glad that this book which means so 
much to me is coming out again, under its 
proper title of "The Nigger of the Narcissus'' 
and under the auspices of my good friends and 
pubHshers Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co. 
into the hght of publicity. 

Half the span of a generation has passed 
since W. E. Henley, after reading two chap- 
ters, sent me a verbal message: "Tell Conrad 

[14 1 



♦'NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS'" 

that if the rest is up to the sample it shall cer- 
tainly come out in the New Review.'' The 
most gratifying recollection of my writer's ji 
life! ^ 

And here is the Suppressed Preface. 

JOSEPH CONRAD. 

1914. 



PREFACE 

A WORK that aspires, however humbly, 
to the condition of art should carry its justi- 
fication in every line. And art itself may be 
defined as a single-minded attempt to render 
the highest kind of justice to the visible 
universe, by bringing to light the truth, mani- 
fold and one, underlying its every aspect. 
It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its 
colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the 
aspects of matter and in the facts of life what 
of each is fundamental, what is enduring and 
essential — their one illuminating and con- 
vincing quality — ^the very truth of their ex- 
istence. The artist, then, like the thinker or 
the scientist, seeks the truth and makes 
his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the 

[15 1 




AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

world the thinker plunges into ideas, the 
scientist into facts — ^whence, presently, 
emerging, they make their appeal to those 
qualities of our being that fit us best for the 
hazardous enterprise of living. They speak 
authoritatively to our common-sense, to our 
intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our 
desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, 
sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism — 
but always to our credulity. And their words 
are heard with reverence, for their concern is 
with weighty matters: with the cultivation 
of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, 
with the attainment of our ambitions, with the 
perfection of the means and the glorification 
of our precious aims. 

It is otherwise with the artist. 

Confronted by the same enigmatical spec- 
tacle the artist descends within himself, and 
in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he 
be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms 
of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less 
obvious capacities : to that part of our nature 
which, because of the warlike conditions of 
existence, is necessarily kept out of sight 
within the more resisting and hard qualities — 
like the vulnerable body within a steel armour. 

[16 1 



"NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS"* 

His appeal is less loud, more profound, less 
distinct, more stirring — and sooner forgotten. 
Yet its effect endures for ever. The changing 
wisdom of successive generations discards 
ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. 
But the artist appeals to that part of our being 
which is not dependent on wisdom; to that 
in us which is a gift and not an acquisition — 
and, therefore, more permanently enduring. 
He speaks to our capacity for delight and 
wonder, to the sense ^f mystery surrounding 
our lives ; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and 
pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with 
air creation — and to the subtle but invincible 
conviction of solidarity that knits together the 
loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the soli- 
darity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspira- 
tionsT in illusions, in hope, in fear, which 
binds men to each other, which binds together 
all humanity — ^the dead to the living and the 
living to the unborn. 

It is only some such train of thought, or 
rather of feeling, that can in a measure ex- 
plain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale 
which follows, to present an unrestful episode 
in the obscure lives of a few individuals out 
of all the disregarded multitude of the be- 

f 17 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

wildered, the simple and the voiceless. For, 
if any part of truth dwells in the belief con- 
fessed above, it becomes evident that there 
is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of 
the earth that does not deserve, if only a 
passing glance of wonder and pity. The 
motive, then, may be held to justify the matter 
of the work ; but this preface, which is simply 
an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here — 
for the avowal is not yet complete. 

Fiction — if it at all aspires to be art — ap- 
peals to temperament. And in truth it must 
be, like painting, like music, like all art, the 
appeal of one temperament to all the other in- 
numerable temperaments whose subtle and 
resistless power endows passing events with 
their true meaning, and creates the moral, 
the emotional atmosphere of the place arid 
time. Such an appeal to be effective must be 
an impression conveyed through the senses; 
and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other 
way, because temperament, whether in- 
dividual or collective, is not amenable to 
persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals pri- 
marily to the senses, and the artistic aim 
when expressing itself in written words must 
also make its appeal through the senses, if its 

f 18 1 



"NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS'" 
high desire is to reach the secret spring of re- 
sponsive emotions. It must strenuously as- 
pire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour 
of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness 
of music — ^which is the art of arts. And it is 
only through complete, unswerving devotion 
to the perfect blending of form and substance ; 
it is only through an unremitting never-dis- 
couraged care for the shape and ring of 
sentences that an approach can be made to 
plasticity, to colour, and that the light of 
magic suggestiveness may be brought to play 
for an evanescent instant over the common- 
place surface of words: of the old, old words, 
worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage. 

The sincere endeavour to accomplish that 
creative task, to go as far on that road as his 
strength will carry him, to go undeterred by 
faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only 
valid justification for the worker in prose. 
And if his conscience is clear, his answer to 
those who in the fulness of a wisdom which 
looks for immediate profit, demand spe- 
cifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who 
demand to be promptly improved, or en- 
couraged, or frightened, or shocked, or 
charmed, must run thus: — My task which I 

f 19 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 
am trying to achieve is, by the power of the 
written word to make you hear, to make you 
feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — 
and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, 
you shall find there according to your deserts: 
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all 
you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse 
of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. 

To snatch in a moment of courage, from the 
remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of 
life, is only the beginning of the task. The 
task approached in tenderness and faith is to 
hold up unquestioningly, without choice and 
without fear, the rescued fragment before 
all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to 
show its vibration, its colour, its form; and 
through its movement, its form, and its 
colour, reveal the substance of its truth — 
disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and 
passion within the core of each convincing 
moment. In a single-minded attempt of that 
kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one 
may perchance attain to such clearness of 
sincerity that at last the presented vision of 
regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken 
in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of 
unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in 

[20 1 



"NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS'" 
mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in 
uncertain fate, which binds men to each other 
and all mankind to the visible world. 

It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, 
holds by the convictions expressed above 
cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary 
formulas of his craft. The enduring part of 
them — the truth which each only imperfectly 
veils — should abide with him as the most 
precious of his possessions, but they all: 
Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the 
unofficial sentiment alism (which, like the poor, 
is exceedingly difficult to get rid of), all these 
gods must, after a short period of fellowship, 
abandon him — even on the very threshold 
of the temple — ^to the stammerings of his 
conscience and to the outspoken consciousness 
of the difficulties of his work. In that un- 
easy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art, 
itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent 
immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased 
to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, 
often incomprehensible, but at times and 
faintly encouraging. 

Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of 
a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a 
labourer in a distant field, and after a time 

[211 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

begin to wonder languidly as to what the fel- 
low may be at. We watch the movements of 
his body, the waving of his arms, we see 
him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin 
again. It may add to the charm of an idle 
hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. 
If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a 
ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more 
real interest at his efforts; we are disposed 
to condone the jar of his agitation upon the 
restfulness of the landscape ; and even, if in a 
brotherly frame of mind, we may bring our- 
selves to forgive his failure. We understood 
his object, and, after all, the fellow has 
tried, and perhaps he had not the strength — 
and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We 
forgive, go on our way — and forget. 

And so it is with the workman of art. Art 
is long and life is short, and success is very far 
off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel 
so far, we talk a little about the aim — the aim 
of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, 
difficult — obscured by mists. It is not in the 
clear logic of a triumphant conclusion ; it is not 
in the unveiling of one of those heartless 
secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. 
It is not less great, but only more difficult. 

[22 1 



TO "TALES OF UNREST" 

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the 
hands busy about the work of the earth, and 
compel men entranced by the sight of distant 
goals to glance for a moment at the sur- 
rounding vision of form and colour, of sun- 
shine and shadows; to make them pause for a 
look, for a sigh, for a smile — such is the aim, 
difficult and evanescent, and reserved only 
for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, 
by the deserving and the fortunate, even that 
task is accomplished. And when it is ac- 
complished — ^behold! — all the truth of life 
is there : a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — 
and the return to an eternal rest. 

J. C. 
1897. 



Of the five stories in this volume The 
Lagoon, the last in order, is the earliest in date. 
It is the first short story I ever wrote and 
marks, in a manner of speaking, the end of my 
first phase, the Malayan phase with its special 
subject and its verbal suggestions. Con- 
ceived in the same mood which produced 
"Almayer's Folly" and "An Outcast of the 
Islands," it is told in the same breath (with 

[23 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

what was left of it, that is, after the end of 
"An Outcast"), seen with the same vision 
rendered in the same method — if such a thing 
as method did exist then in my conscious 
relation to this new adventure of writing for 
print. I doubt it very much. One does 
one's work first and theorizes about it after- 
wards. It is a very amusing and egotistical 
occupation of no use whatever to any one and 
just as likely as not to lead to false conclusions. 
Anybody can see that between the last 
paragraph of "An Outcast" and the first of The 
Lagoon there has been no change of pen, 
figuratively speaking. It happens also to be 
literally true. It was the same pen : a common 
steel pen. Having been charged with a cer- 
tain lack of emotional faculty I am glad to be 
able to say that on one occasion at least I did 
give way to a sentimental impulse. I thought 
the pen had been a good pen and that it had 
done enough for me, and so, with the idea 
of keeping it for a sort of memento on which I 
could look later with tender eyes, I put it into 
my waistcoat pocket. Afterwards it used to 
turn up in all sorts of places, at the bottom of 
small drawers, among my studs in cardboard 
boxes, till at last it found permanent rest in a 

[24 1 



TO "TALES OF UNREST" 

large wooden bowl containing some loose keys, 
bits of sealing wax, bits of string, small broken 
chains, a few buttons, and similar minute 
wreckage that washes out of a man's life into 
such receptacles. I would catch sight of it 
from time to time with a distinct feeling of 
satisfaction till, one day, I perceived with 
horror that there were two old pens in there. 
How the other pen found its way into the 
bowl instead of the fireplace or wastepaper 
basket I can't imagine, but there the two 
were, lying side by side, both encrusted with 
ink and completely undistinguishable from 
each other. It was very distressing, but being 
determined not to share my sentiment between 
two pens or run the risk of sentimentalizing 
over a mere stranger, I threw them both out 
of the window into a flower bed — which strikes 
me now as a poetical grave for the remnants of 
one's past. 

But the tale remained. It was first fixed in 
print in the Cornhill Magazine, being my first 
appearance in a serial of any kind ; and I have 
lived long enough to see it most agreeably 
guyed by Mr. Max Beerbohm in a volume of 
parodies entitled "A Christmas Garland," 
where I found myself in very good company. 

[25 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

I was immensely gratified. I began to believe 
in my public existence. I have much to thank 
The Lagoon for. 

My next effort in short story writing was a 
departure — I mean a departure from the 
Malay Archipelago. Without premeditation, 
without sorrow, without rejoicing and almost 
without noticing it, I stepped into the very 
different atmosphere of An Outpost of Prog- 
ress. I found there a different moral atti- 
tude. I seemed able to capture new reactions, 
new suggestions, and even new rhythms for my 
paragraphs. For a moment I fancied myself 
a new man — a most exciting illusion. It 
clung to me for some time, monstrous, half 
conviction and half hope as to its body with 
an iridescent tail of dreams and with a change- 
able head like a plastic mask. It was only 
later that I perceived that in common with the 
rest of men nothing could deliver me from my 
fatal consistency. We cannot escape from 
ourselves. 

An Outpost of Progress is the lightest part 
of the loot I carried off from Central Africa, 
the main portion being of course The Heart 
of Darkness. Other men have found a lot of 
quite different things there and I have the 

[26 1 



TO "TALES OF UNREST" 

comfortable conviction that what I took 
would not have been of much use to anybody 
else. And it must be said that it was but a 
very small amount of plunder. All of it 
could go into one's breast pocket when folded 
neatly. As for the story itself it is true 
enough in its essentials. The sustained in- 
vention of a really telling lie demands a talent 
which I do not possess. 

The Idiots is such an obviously derivative 
piece of work that it is impossible for me to 
say anything about it here. The suggestion 
of it was not mental but visual: the actual 
idiots. It was after an interval of long grop- 
ing amongst vague impulses and hesitations 
which ended in the production of "The Nigger" 
that I turned to my third short story in the 
order of time, the first in this volume: Karain: 
A Memory. 

Reading it after many years Karain pro- 
duced on me the effect of something seen 
through a pair of glasses from a rather ad- 
vantageous position. In that story I had not 
gone back to the Archipelago, I had only 
turned for another look at it. I admit that I 
was absorbed by the distant view, so absorbed 
that I didn't notice then that the motif of the 

[27 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

story is almost identical with the motif of The 
Lagoon. However, the idea at the back is 
very different; but the story is mainly made 
memorable to me by the fact that it was my 
first contribution to Blackwood's Magazine 
and that it led to my personal acquaintance 
with Mr. William Blackwood whose guarded 
appreciation I felt nevertheless to be genuine, 
and prized accordingly. Karain was begun 
on a sudden impulse only three days after I 
wrote the last line of "The Nigger," and the 
recollection of its difficulties is mixed up with 
the worries of the unfinished Return, the last 
pages of which I took up again at the time; the 
only instance in my life when I made an attempt 
to write with both hands at once as it were. 

Indeed my innermost feeling, now, is that 
The Return is a left-handed production. 
Looking through that story lately I had the 
material impression of sitting under a large 
and expensive umbrella in the loud drum- 
ming of a furious rain-shower. It was very 
distracting. In the general uproar one could 
hear every individual drop strike on the 
stout and distended silk. Mentally, the read- 
ing rendered me dumb for the remainder of the 
day, not exactly with astonishment but with 

[28 1 



TO "LORD JIM" 

a sort of dismal wonder. I don't want to talk 
disrespectfully of any pages of mine. Psy- 
chologically there were no doubt good reasons 
for my attempt; and it was worth while, if 
only to see of what excesses I was capable in 
that sort of virtuosity. In this connection I 
should like to confess my surprise on finding 
that notwithstanding all its apparatus of 
analysis the story consists for the most part 
of physical impressions; impressions of sound 
and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting 
horse, reflections in mirrors and so on, ren- 
dered as if for their own sake and combined 
with a sublimated description of a desirable 
middle class town-residence which somehow 
manages to produce a sinister effect. For the 
rest any kind word about The Return (and 
there have been such words said at different 
times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, 
for I know how much the writing of that fan- 
tasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and in 

disillusion. 

J. C. 



When this novel first appeared in book form 
a notion got about that I had been bolted away 

[29 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

with. Some reviewers maintained that the 
work starting as a short story had got beyond 
the writer's control. One or two discovered 
internal evidence of the fact, which seemed to 
amuse them. They pointed out the limita- 
tions of the narrative form. They argued 
that no man could have been expected to talk 
all that time, and other men to listen so long. 
It was not, they said, very credible. 

After thinking it over for something like 
sixteen years I am not so sure about that. 
Men have been known, both in tropics and 
in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night 
"swapping yarns." This, however, is but 
one yarn, yet with interruptions affording 
some measure of relief; and in regard to the 
listeners' endurance, the postulate must be 
accepted that the story was interesting. It is 
the necessary preliminary assumption. If I 
hadn't believed that it was interesting I could 
never have begun to write it. As to the mere 
physical possibility we all know that some 
speeches in Parliament have taken nearer 
six than three hours in delivery; whereas 
all that part of the book which is Marlow's 
narrative can be read through aloud, I should 
say, in less than three hours. Besides — 

[30] 



TO "LORD JIM" 

though I have kept strictly all such insigni- 
ficant details out of the tale — ^we may pre- 
sume that there must have been refreshments 
on that night, a glass of mineral water of some 
sort to help the narrator on. 

But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, 
that my first thought was of a short story, 
concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; 
nothing more. And that was a legitimate con- 
ception. After writing a few pages, however, 
I became for some reason discontented and I 
laid them aside for a time. I didn't take them 
out of the drawer till the late Mr. William 
Blackwood suggested I should give something 
again to his magazine. 

It was only then that I perceived that the 
pilgrim ship episode was a good starting-point 
for a free and wandering tale; that it was an 
event, too, which could conceivably colour 
the whole "sentiment of existence" in a 
simple and sensitive character. But all these 
preliminary moods and stirrings of spirit were 
rather obscure at the time, and they do not 
appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so 
many years. 

The few pages I had laid aside were not 
without their weight in the choice of subject. 

[31] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

But the whole was re-written dehberately. 
When I sat down to it I knew it would be a 
long book, though I didn't foresee that it 
would spread itself over thirteen numbers of 
Maga. 

I have been asked at times whether this 
was not the book of mine I liked best. I am a 
great foe to favouritism in public life, in 
private life, and even in the delicate relation- 
ship of an author to his works. As a matter 
of principle I will have no favourites; but 
I don't go so far as to feel grieved and annoyed 
by the preference some people give to my 
"Lord Jim." I won't even say that I "fail to 
understand. . . ." No! But once I had 
occasion to be puzzled and surprised. 

A friend of mine returning from Italy had 
talked with a lady there who did not like the 
book. I regretted that, of course, but what 
surprised me was the ground of her dislike. 
"You know," she said, "it is all so morbid." 

The pronouncement gave me food for an 
hour's anxious thought. Finally I arrived 
at the conclusion that, making due allowances 
for the subject itself being rather foreign to 
women's normal sensibilities, the lady could 
not have been an Italian. I wonder whether 

[32 1 



TO "YOUTH" 

she was European at all? In any case, no 
Latin temperament would have perceived 
anything morbid in the acute consciousness of 
lost honour. Such a consciousness may be 
wrong, or it may be right, or it may be con- 
demned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim 
is not a type of wide commonness. But I can 
safely assure my readers that he is not the 
product of coldly perverted thinking. He's 
not a figure of Northern Mists either. One 
sunny morning in the commonplace sur- 
roundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his 
form pass by — appealing — significant — under 
a cloud — perfectly silent. Which is as it 
should be. It was for me, with all the sym- 
pathy of which I was capable, to seek fit 
words for his meaning. He was "one of us." 

J. C. 
June, 1917. 



The three stories in this volume lay no claim 
to unity of artistic purpose. The only bond 
between them is that of the time in which they 
were written. They belong to the period 
inmaediately following the publication of "The 
Nigger of the Narcissus,'' and preceding the 

[33 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

first conception of "Nostromo," two books 
which, it seems to me, stand apart and by 
themselves in the body of my work. It is also 
the period during which I contributed to 
Maga; a period dominated by " Lord Jim " and 
associated in my grateful memory with the 
late Mr. William Blackwood's encouraging 
and helpful kindness. 

"Youth" was not my first contribution to 
Maga. It was the second. But that story 
marks the first appearance in the world of the 
man Marlow, with whom my relations have 
grown very intimate in the course of years. 
The origins of that gentleman (nobody as 
far as I know had ever hinted that he was 
anything but that) — ^his origins have been the 
subject of some literary speculation of, I 
am glad to say, a friendly nature. 

One would think that I am the proper per- 
son to throw a light on the matter; but in 
truth I find that it isn't so easy. It is pleas- 
ant to remember that nobody had charged 
him with fraudulent purposes or looked down 
on him as a charlatan ; but apart from that he 
was supposed to be all sorts of things: a clever 
screen, a mere device, a "personator," a 
familiar spirit, a whispering "daemon." I 

[34 1 



TO "YOUTH'' 

myself have been suspected of a meditated 
plan for his capture. 

That is not so. I made no plans. The man 
Marlow and I came together in the casual 
manner of those health-resort acquaintances 
which sometimes ripen into friendships. This 
one has ripened. For all his assertiveness in 
matters of opinion he is not an intrusive per- 
son. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, 
in silence, we lay our heads together in great 
comfort and harmony; but as we part at the 
end of a tale I am never sure that it may not 
be for the last time. Yet I don't think that 
either of us would care much to survive the 
other. In his case, at any rate, his occupation 
would be gone and he would suffer from that 
extinction, because I suspect him of some 
vanity. I don't mean vanity in the Solo- 
monian sense. Of all my people he's the one 
that has never been a vexation to my spirit. 
A most discreet, understanding man. . . . 

Even before appearing in book-form 
"Youth" was very well received. It lies on 
me to confess at last, and this is as good a 
place for it as another, that I have been all 
my life — all my two lives — ^the spoiled adopted 
child of Great Britain and even of the Empire ; 

[35] 



AUTHOR^S NOTE 

for it was Australia that gave me my first 
command. I break out into this declaration 
not because of a lurking tendency to mega- 
lomania, but, on the contrary, as a man who 
has no very notable illusions about himself. 
I follow the instinct of vain-glory and humility 
natural to all mankind. For it can hardly be 
denied that it is not their own deserts that 
men are most proud of, but rather of their 
prodigious luck, of their marvellous fortune: 
of that in their lives for which thanks and 
sacrifices must be offered on the altars of the 
inscrutable gods. 

Heart of Darkness also received a certain 
amount of notice from the first; and of its 
origins this much may be said : it is well known 
that curious men go prying into all sorts of 
places (where they have no business) and come 
out of them with all kinds of spoil. This 
story, and one other, not in this volume, are 
all the spoil I brought out from the centre of 
Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business. 
More ambitious in its scope and longer in the 
telling. Heart of Darkness is quite as 
authentic in fundamentals as Youth. It 
is, obviously, written in another mood. I 
won't characterize the mood precisely, but 

[36] 



TO "YOUTH'' 

anybody can see that it is anything but the 
mood of wistful regret, of reminiscent tender- 
ness. 

One more remark may be added. Youth 
is a feat of memory. It is a record of exper- 
ience; but that experience, in its facts, in its 
inwardness and in its outward colouring, 
begins and ends in myself. Heart of Dark- 
ness is experience, too; but it is experience 
pushed a little (and only very little) beyond 
the actual facts of the case for the perfectly 
legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it 
home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. 
There it was no longer a matter of sincere 
colouring. It was Hke another art altogether. 
That sombre theme had to be given a sinister 
resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued 
vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air 
and dwell on the ear after the last note had 
been struck. 

After saying so much there remains the last 
tale of the book, still untouched. The 
End of the Tether is a story of sea-life in a 
rather special way; and the most intimate 
thing I can say of it is this : that having lived 
that life fully, amongst its men, its thoughts 
and sensations, I have found it possible, 

[37 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

without the shghtest misgiving, in all sin- 
cerity of heart and peace of conscience, to 
conceive the existence of Captain Whalley's 
personality and to relate the manner of his end. 
This statement acquires some force from the 
circumstance that the pages of that story — 
a fair half of the book — are also the product 
of experience. That experience belongs (like 
"Youth's") to the time before I ever thought 
of putting pen to paper. As to its "reality" 
that is for the readers to determine. One had 
to pick up one's facts here and there. More 
skill would have made them more real and 
the whole composition more interesting. But 
here we are approaching the veiled region of 
artistic values which it would be improper and 
indeed dangerous for me to enter. I have 
looked over the proofs, have corrected a mis- 
print or two, have changed a word or two — 
and that's all. It is not very likely that I 
shall ever read The End of the Tether 
again. No more need be said. It accords 
best with my feelings to part from Captain 

Whalley in affectionate silence. 

J. C. 
1917. 



38 



TO "TYPHOON" 

The main characteristic of this volume con- 
sists in this, that all the stories composing it 
belong not only to the same period but have 
been written one after another in the order 
in which they appear in the book. 

The period is that which follows on my con- 
nection with Blackwood's Magazine. I had 
just finished writing The End of the Tether 
and was casting about for some subject which 
could be developed in a shorter form than the 
tales in the volume of "Youth" when the in- 
stance of a steamship full of returning coolies 
from Singapore to some port in northern China 
occurred to my recollection. Years before I 
had heard it being talked about in the East as 
a recent occurrence. It was for us merely one 
subject of conversation amongst many others 
of the kind. Men earning their bread in 
any very specialized occupation will talk shop, 
not only because it is the most vital interest 
of their lives but also because they have not 
much knowledge of other subjects. They 
have never had the time to get acquainted 
with them. Life, for most of us, is not so 
much a hard as an exacting taskmaster. 

I never met anybody personally concerned 
in this affair, the interest of which for us was, 

[39] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

of course, not the bad weather but the extraor- 
dinary compHcation brought into the ship's 
Hfe at a moment of exceptional stress by the 
human element below her deck. Neither 
was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my 
hearing. In that company each of us could 
imagine easily what the whole thing was like. 
The financial difficulty of it, presenting also a 
human problem, was solved by a mind much 
too simple to be perplexed by anything in 
the world except men's idle talk for which it 
was not adapted. 

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere 
statement I might say, that such a thing had 
happened on the high seas, appeared to me a 
sufficient subject for meditation. Yet it was 
but a bit of a sea yarn after all. I felt that to 
bring out its deeper significance which was 
quite apparent to me, something other, some- 
thing more was required; a leading motive 
that would harmonize all these violent noises, 
and a point of view that would put all that 
elemental fury into its proper place. 

What was needed of course was Captain 
MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could 
see that he was the man for the situation. I 
don't mean to say that I ever saw Captain 

[40] 



TO "TYPHOON" 

MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in 
contact with his Hteral mind and his dauntless 
temperament. MacWhirr is not an acquain- 
tance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few 
months. He is the product of twenty years of 
hfe. My own Hfe. Conscious invention had 
httle to do with him. If it is true that Cap- 
tain MacWhirr never walked and breathed on 
this earth (which I find for my part extremely 
difficult to beheve) I can also assure my read- 
ers that he is perfectly authentic. I may 
venture to assert the same of every aspect 
of the story, while I confess that the particu- 
lar typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of 
my actual experience. 

At its first appearance "Typhoon," the story, 
was classed by some critics as a deliberately 
intended storm-piece. Others picked out 
MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite 
symbolic intention. Neither was exclusively 
my intention. Both the typhoon and Cap- 
tain MacWhirr presented themselves to me as 
the necessities of the deep conviction with 
which I approached the subject of the story. 
It was their opportunity. It was also my 
opportunity, and it would be vain to discourse 
about what I made of it in a handful of pages, 

[41] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

since the pages themselves are here, between 
the covers of this volume, to speak for them- 
selves. 

This is a belated reflection. If it had oc- 
curred to me before it would have perhaps 
done away with the existence of this Author's 
J Note; for, indeed, the same remark apphes 
to every story in this volume. None of them 
t \ are stories of experience in the absolute sense 
/ / of the word. Experience in them is but the 
I canvas of the attempted picture. Each of 
them has its more than one intention. With 
each the question is what the writer has done 
Avith his opportunity; and each answers the 
question for itself in words which, if I may say 
so without undue solemnity, were written with 
a conscientious regard for the truth of my own 
sensations. And each of those stories, to 
mean something, must justify itself in its own 
way to the conscience of each successive 
reader. 

Falk — the second story in the volume — 
offended the delicacy of one critic at least by 
certain peculiarities of its subject. But what 
is the subject of Falk.^^ I personally do not 
feel so very certain about it. He who reads 
must find out for himself. My intention in 

[42] 



TO "TYPHOON" 

writing Falk was not to shock anybody. 
As in most of my writings I insist not on the 
events but on their effect upon the persons in 
the tale. But in everything I have written 
there is always one invaria^ble intention, and 
that is to ca^pture the reader's attention, 
by securing his interest and enlisting Iiis 
sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever 
it may be, within the limits of the visible world 
and within the boundaries of human emotions. 
I may safely say that Falk is absolutely true 
to my experience of certain straightforward 
characters combining a perfectly natural ruth- 
lessness with a certain amount of moral 
delicacy. Falk obeys the law of self-preserva- 
tion without the slightest misgivings as to 
right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly 
preserved life he will not condescend to dodge 
the truth. As he is presented as sensitive 
enough to be affected permanently by a cer- 
tain unusual experience, that experience had 
to be set by me before the reader vividly; but 
it is not the subject of the tale. If we go by 
mere facts then the subject is Falk's attempt 
to get married; in which the narrator of the 
tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both 
on its ruthless and its delicate side. 

[43 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

Falk shares with one other of my stories 
(The Return in the "Tales of Unrest" 
volume) the distinction of never having been 
serialized. I think the copy was shown to the 
editor of some magazine who rejected it in- 
dignantly on the sole ground that "the girl 
never says anything." This is perfectly true. 
From first to last Hermann's niece utters no 
word in the tale — and it is not because she is 
dumb, but for the simple reason that when- 
ever she happens to come under the observa- 
tion of the narrator she has either no occasion 
or is too profoundly moved to speak. The 
editor, who obviously had read the story, 
might have perceived that for himself. Ap- 
parently he did not, and I refrained from 
pointing out the impossibility to him because, 
since he did not venture to say that "the girl" 
did not live, I felt no concern at his indigna- 
tion. 

All the other stories were serialized. 
"Typhoon" appeared in the early numbers of 
the Pall Mall Magazine, then under the direc- 
tion of the late Mr. Halkett. It was on that 
occasion too, that I saw for the first time my 
conceptions rendered by an artist in another 
medium. Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen knew 

[44] 



TO *'NOSTROMO" 

how to combine in his illustrations the effect of 
his own most distinguished personal vision with 
an absolute fidelity to the inspiration of the 
writer. Amy Foster was published in The 
Illustrated London News with a fine drawing of 
Amy on her day out giving tea to the children 
at her home in a hat with a big feather. To- 
morrow appeared first in the Pall Mall 
Magazine. Of that story I will only say that 
it struck many people by its adaptability to the 
stage and that I was induced to dramatize it 
under the title of " One Day More " ; up to the 
present my only effort in that direction. I may 
also add that each of the four stories on their 
appearance in book form was picked out on 
various grounds as the "best of the lot" by 
different critics, who reviewed the volume 
with a warmth of appreciation and under- 
standing, a sympathetic insight and a friend- 
liness of expression for which I cannot be 
sufficiently grateful. 

J. C. 
1919. 



"NosTROMo" is the most anxiously medi- 
tated of the longer novels which belong to the 

f45 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 
period following upon the publication of the 
"Typhoon" volume of short stories. 

I don't mean to say that I became then 
conscious of any impending change in my 
mentality and in my attitude towards the 
tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there 
was never any change, except in that mys- 
terious, extraneous thing which has nothing 
to do with the theories of art; a subtle change 
in the nature of the inspiration; a phenome- 
non for which I can not in any way be 
held responsible. What, however, did cause 
me some concern was that after finishing the 
last story of the "Typhoon" volume it 
seemed somehow that there was nothing more 
in the world to write about. 

This so strangely negative but disturbing 
mood lasted some little time; and then, as 
with many of my longer stories, the first hint 
for "Nostromo" came to me in the shape of a 
vagrant anecdote completely destitute of 
valuable details. 

As a matter of fact in 1875 or '6, when 
very young, in the West Indies or rather in the 
Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land 
were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story 
of some man who was supposed to have stolen 

[461 



TO "NOSTROMO" 

single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, 
somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard dur- 
ing the troubles of a revolution. 

On the face of it this was something of a 
feat. But I heard no details, and having no 
particular interest in crime qua crime I was 
not likely to keep that one in my mind. 
And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven years 
afterwards I came upon the very thing in a 
shabby volume picked up outside a second- 
hand book-shop. It was the hfe story of an 
American seaman written by himself with the 
assistance of a journalist. In the course of 
his wanderings that American sailor worked 
for some months on board a schooner, the 
master and owner of which was the thief of 
whom I had heard in my very young days. I 
have no doubt of that because there could 
hardly have been two exploits of the pecu- 
liar kind in the same part of the world and 
both connected with a South American revolu- 
tion. 

The fellow had actually managed to steal a 
lighter with silver, and this, it seems only be- 
cause he was implicitly trusted by his em- 
ployers, who must have been singularly poor 
judges of character. In the sailor's story he 

[47] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a 
small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of 
mean appearance, and altogether unworthy 
of the greatness this opportunity had thrust 
upon him. What was interesting was that he 
would boast of it openly. 

He used to say: "People think I make a lot 
of money in this schooner of mine. But that is 
nothing. I don't care for that. Now and 
then I go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. 
I must get rich slowly — you understand." 

There was also another curious point about 
the man. Once in the course of some quarrel 
the sailor threatened him: "What's to pre- 
vent me reporting ashore what you have told 
me about that silver .^^" 

The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the 
least. He actually laughed. "You fool, if 
you dare talk hke that on shore about me you 
will get a knife stuck in your back. Every 
man, woman, and child in that port is my 
friend. And who's to prove the hghter 
wasn't sunk? I didn't show you where the 
silver is hidden. Did 1? So you know noth- 
ing. And suppose I lied? Eh?" 

Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the 
sordid meanness of that impenitent thief, 

[48 1 



TO "NOSTROMO" 

deserted from the schooner. The whole epi- 
sode takes about three pages of his auto- 
biography. Nothing to speak of; but as I 
looked them over, the curious confirmation of 
the few casual words heard in my early youth 
evoked the memories of that distant time when 
everything was so fresh, so surprising, so 
venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange 
coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the 
sunshine, men's passions in the dusk, gossip 
half-forgotten, faces grown dim. . . . 
Perhaps, perhaps, there still was in the world 
something to write about. Yet I did not 
see anything at first in the mere story. A 
rascal steals a large parcel of a valuable 
commodity — so people say. It's either true 
or untrue; and in any case it has no value in 
itself. To invent a circumstantial account of 
the robbery did not appeal to me, because my 
talents not running that way I did not think 
that the game was worth the candle. It was 
only when it dawned upon me that the pur- 
loiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a 
confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man 
of character, an actor and possibly a victim in 
the changing scenes of a revolution, it was 
only then that I had the first vision of a 

[49 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

twilight country which was to become the 
province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy 
Sierra and its misty Campo for mute witnesses 
of events flowing from the passions of men 
short-sighted in good and evil. 

Such are in very truth the obscure origins 
of "Nostromo" — the book. From that mo- 
ment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then 
I hesitate, as if warned by the instinct of self- 
preservation from venturing on a distant and 
toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues 
and revolutions. But it had to be done. 

It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to 
do; with many intervals of renewed hesitation, 
lest I should lose myself in the ever-enlarging 
vistas opening before me as I progressed 
deeper in my knowledge of the country. 
Often, also, when I had thought myself to a 
standstill over the tangled-up affairs of the 
Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack 
my bag, rush away from Sulaco for a change 
of air and write a few pages of "The Mirror 
of the Sea." But generally, as I've said be- 
fore, my sojourn on the Continent of Latin 
America, famed for its hospitality, lasted for 
about two years. On my return I found 
(speaking somewhat in the style of Captain 
[50] 



TO *'NOSTROMO" 

Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily 
glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and 
our small boy considerably grown during my 
absence. 

My principal authority for the history of 
Costaguana is, of course, my venerated friend, 
the late Don Jose Avellanos, Minister to the 
Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his 
impartial and eloquent "History of Fifty 
Years of Misrule." That work was never 
published — the reader will discover why — 
and I am in fact the only person in the world 
possessed of its contents. I have mastered 
them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, 
and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. 
In justice to myself, and to allay the fears of 
prospective readers, I beg to point out that the 
few historical allusions are never dragged 
in for the sake of parading my unique erudi- 
tion, but that each of them is closely related to 
actuality ; either throwing a light on the nature 
of current events or affecting directly the 
fortunes of the people of whom I speak. 

As to their own histories I have tried to set 
them down, Aristocracy and People, men and 
women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and 
politician, with as cool a hand as was possible 

[511 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

in the heat and clash of my own conflicting 
emotions. And after all this is also the 
story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to 
say how far they are deserving of interest in 
their actions and in the secret purposes of their 
hearts revealed in the bitter necessities of the 
time. I confess that, for me, that time is the 
time of firm friendships and unforgotten 
hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must 
mention here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady of 
Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the 
secret devotion of Dr. Monygham, and 
Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Ma- 
terial Interests whom we must leave to his 
Mine — from which there is no escape in this 
world. 

About Nostromo, the second of the two 
racially and socially contrasted men, both 
captured by the silver of the San Tome Mine, 
I feel bound to say something more. 

I did not hesitate to make that central figure 
an Italian. First of all the thing is perfectly 
credible: Italians were swarming into the 
Occidental Province at the time, as anybody 
who will read further can see; and secondly, 
there was no one who could stand so well by 
the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the 

[52] 



TO "NOSTROMO'* 

Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. 
For myself I needed there a man of the People 
as free as possible from his class-conventions 
and all settled modes of thinking. This is not 
a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were 
not moral but artistic. Had he been an 
Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into 
local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire 
to be a leader in a personal game. He does not 
want to raise himself above the mass. He is 
content to feel himself a power — within the 
People. 

But mainly Nostromo is what he is because 
I received the inspiration for him in my early 
days from a Mediterranean sailor. Those 
who have read certain pages of mine will see at 
once what I mean when I say that Dominic, 
the padrone of the TremoUno, might under 
given circumstances have been a Nostromo. 
At any rate Dominic would have understood 
the younger man perfectly — if scornfully. 
He and I were engaged together in a rather 
absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not 
matter. It is a real satisfaction to think 
that in my very young days there must, after 
all, have been something in me worthy to 
command that man's half-bitter fidelity, his 

f 53 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's 
speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice. 
His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes 
roaming the horizon from within the monkish 
hood shadowing his face, he would utter the 
usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: 
"Vous autres gentilhommes!" in a caustic 
tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like Nos- 
tromo! "You hombres finos!" Very much 
like Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican 
nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which 
my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage 
had to be more ancient still. He is a man 
with the weight of countless generations be- 
hind him and no parentage to boast of. 
. . . Like the People. 

In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in 
his improvidence and generosity, in his lavish- 
ness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in the 
obscure sense of his greatness and in his faith- 
ful devotion with something despairing as well 
as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man of the 
People, their very own unenvious force, 
disdaining to lead but ruling from within. 
Years afterwards, grown older as the famous 
Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the country, 
going about his many affairs followed by 

[54] 



TO ''NOSTROMO'^ 

respectful glances in the modernized streets 
of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, 
attending the Lodge, listening in unmoved 
silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, 
the enigmatical patron of the new revolu- 
tionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy 
comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his 
moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains 
essentially a man of the People. In his 
mingled love and scorn of life and in the be- 
wildered conviction of having been betrayed, 
of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or 
by whom, he is still of the People, their un- 
doubted Great Man — with a private history 
of his own. 

One more figure of those stirring times 
I would like to mention: and that is An- 
tonia Avellanos — the "beautiful Antonia." 
Whether she is a possible variation of Latin- 
American girlhood I wouldn't dare to affirm. 
But, for me, she is. Always a little in the 
background by the side of her father (my 
venerated friend) I hope she has yet relief 
enough to make intelligible what I am going 
to say. Of all the people who had seen with 
me the birth of the Occidental Republic, she 
is the only one who has kept in my memory 

[55] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

the aspect of continued life. Antonia the 
Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the 
People are the artisans of the New Era, the 
true creators of the New State; he by his 
legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, 
simply by the force of what she is: the only 
being capable of inspiring a sincere passion 
in the heart of a trifler. 

If anything could induce me to revisit 
Sulaco (I should hate to see all these changes) 
it would be Antonia. And the true reason for 
that — why not be frank about it? — the true 
reason is that I have modelled her on my first 
love. How we, a band of tallish schoolboys, 
the chums of her two brothers, how we used to 
look up to that girl just out of the schoolroom 
herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to 
which we all were born but which she alone 
knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching 
hope! She had perhaps more glow and less 
serenity in her soul than Antonia, but she was 
an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism 
with no taint of the slightest worldliness in her 
thoughts. I was not the only one in love with 
her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her 
scathing criticism of my levities — ^very much 
like poor Decoud — or stand the brunt of her 

[56 1 



TO ''NOSTROMO" 

austere, unanswerable invective. She did not 
quite understand — ^but never mind. That 
afternoon when I came in, a shrinking yet 
defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I re- 
ceived a hand-squeeze that made my heart 
leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. 
She was softened at the last as though she had 
suddenly perceived (we were such children 
still!) that I was really going away for good, 
going very far away — even as far as Sulaco, 
lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the 
darkness of the Placid Gulf. 

That's why I long sometimes for another 
glimpse of the "beautiful Antonia" (or can 
it be the Other.^^) moving in the dimness of the 
great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the 
tomb of the first and last Cardinal- Arch- 
bishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial 
devotion before the monument of Don Jose 
'Avellanos, and, with a lingering, tender, 
faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to 
Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the 
sunshine of the Plaza with her upright carriage 
and her white head; a relic of the past dis- 
regarded by men awaiting impatiently the 
Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of 
more Revolutions. 

[57 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did 
understand perfectly well at the time that the 
moment the breath left the body of the 
Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People, 
freed at last from the toils of love and wealth, 
there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco. 

J. C. 

October, 1917. 



Less perhaps than any other book written 
by me, or anybody else, does this volume re- 
quire a Preface. Yet since all the others in- 
cluding even the "Personal Record", which is 
but a fragment of biography, are to have their 
Author's Notes, I cannot possibly leave this 
one without, lest a false impression of indiffer- 
ence or weariness should be created. I can 
see only too well that it is not going to be an 
easy task. Necessity — the mother of inven- 
tion — ^being even unthinkable in this case, I 
do not know what to invent in the way of 
discourse ; and necessity being also the greatest 
possible incentive to exertion I don't even 
know how to begin to exert myself. Here 
too the natural inclination comes in. I have 
been all my life averse from exertion. 

[58 1 



TO "THE MIRROR OF THE SEA" 

Under these discouraging circumstances I 
am, however, bound to proceed from a sense 
of duty. This Note is a thing promised. In 
less than a minute's time by a few incautious 
words I entered into a bond which has lain 
on my heart heavily ever since. 

For, this book is a very intimate revela- 
tion; and what that is revealing can a few more 
pages add to some three hundred others of 
most sincere disclosures!^ I have attempted 
here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last 
hour's confession the terms of my relation with 
the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like 
any great passion the inscrutable Gods send 
to mortals, went on unreasoning and invin- 
cible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying 
the disenchantment that lurks in every day 
of a strenuous life; went on full of love's de- 
light and love's anguish, facing them in open- 
eyed exultation, without bitterness and with- 
out repining, from the first hour to the last. 

Subjugated but never unmanned I sur- 
rendered my being to that passion which 
various and great like life itself had also its 
periods of wonderful serenity which even a 
fickle mistress can give sometimes on her 
soothed breast, full of wiles, full of fury, 

[59] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

and yet capable of an enchanting sweetness. 
And if anybody suggest that this must be the 
lyric illusion of an old, romantic heart, I can 
answer that for twenty years I had lived hke a 
hermit with my passion! Beyond the line 
of the sea horizon the world for me did not 
exist as assuredly as it does not exist for the 
mystics who take refuge on the tops of high 
mountains. I am speaking now of that 
innermost life, containing the best and the 
worst that can happen to us in the tempera- 
mental depths of our being, where a man 
indeed must live alone but need not give 
up all hope of holding converse with his 
kind. 

This perhaps is enough for me to say on this 
particular occasion about these, my parting 
words, about this, my last mood in my great 
passion for the sea. I call it great because it 
was great to me. Others may call it a foolish 
infatuation. Those words have been applied 
to every love story. But whatever it may be 
the fact remains that it was something too 
great for words. 

This is what I always felt vaguely; and 
therefore the following pages rest like a true 
confession on matters of fact which to a 

[60 1 



TO "THE MIRROR OF THE SEA" 

friendly and charitable person may convey 
the inner truth of almost a lifetime. From 
sixteen to thirty-six cannot be called an age, 
yet it is a pretty long stretch of that sort of 
experience which teaches a man slowly to see 
and feel. It is for me a distinct period; and 
when I emerged from it into another air, as it 
were, and said to myself: "Now I must speak 
of these things or remain unknown to the end 
of my days," it was with the ineradicable 
hope, that accompanies one through solitude 
as well as through a crowd, of ultimately, 
some day, at some moment, making myself 
understood. 

And I have been! I have been understood 
as completely as it is possible to be understood 
in this, our world, which seems to be mostly 
composed of riddles. There have been things 
said about this book which have moved me 
profoundly; the more profoundly because 
they were uttered by men whose occupation 
was avowedly to understand, and analyze, and 
expound — in a word, by literary critics. 
They spoke out according to their conscience, 
and some of them said things that made me 
feel both glad and sorry of ever having en- 
tered upon my confession. Dimly or clearly, 

[611 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

they perceived the character of my intention 
and ended by judging me worthy to have 
made the attempt. They saw it was of a 
reveahng character, but in some cases they 
thought that the revelation was not complete. 

One of them said: "In reading these chap- 
ters one is always hoping for the revelation; 
but the personahty is never quite revealed. 
We can only say that this thing happened to 
Mr. Conrad, that he knew such a man and 
that thus life passed him leaving those mem- 
ories. They are the records of the events 
of his life, not in every instance striking or 
decisive events but rather those haphazard 
events which for no definite reason impress 
themselves upon the mind and recur in mem- 
ory long afterward as symbols of one knows 
not what sacred ritual taking place behind 
the veil." 

To this I can only say that this book written 
in perfect sincerity holds back nothing — unless 
the mere bodily presence of the writer. 
Within these pages I make a full confession 
not of my sins but of my emotions. It is 
the best tribute my piety can offer to the 
ultimate shapers of my character, convictions, 
and, in a sense, destiny — to the imperishable 

[62 1 



TO "THE SECRET AGENT" 

sea, to the ships that are no more and to the 
simple men who have had their day. 

J. C. 

1919. 



The origin of "The Secret Agent": subject, 
treatment, artistic purpose and every other 
motive that may induce an author to take up 
his pen, can, I beheve, be traced to a period of 
mental and emotional reaction. 

The actual facts are that I began this book 
impulsively and wrote it continuously. When 
in due course it was bound and delivered to 
the public gaze I found myself reproved for 
having produced it at all. Some of the ad- 
monitions were severe, others had a sorrowful 
note. I have not got them textually before 
me but I remember perfectly the general argu- 
ment, which was very simple; and also my 
surprise at its nature. All this sounds a very 
old story now! And yet it is not such a long 
time ago. I must conclude that I had still 
preserved much of my pristine innocence in 
the year 190T. It seems to me now that even 
an artless person might have foreseen that 
some criticisms would be based on the ground 

[63 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

of sordid surroundings and the moral squalor 
of the tale. 

That, of course, is a serious objection. It 
was not universal. In fact, it seems ungra- 
cious to remember so little reproof amongst so 
much intelligent and sympathetic apprecia- 
tion; and I trust that the readers of this 
Preface will not hasten to put it down to 
wounded vanity of a natural disposition to 
ingratitude. I suggest that a charitable 
heart could very well ascribe my choice to 
natural modesty. Yet it isn't exactly modesty 
that makes me select reproof for the illustra- 
tion of my case. No, it isn't exactly modesty. 
I am not at all certain that I am modest; but 
those who have read so far through my work 
will credit me with enough decency, tact, 
savoir faire, what you will, to prevent me 
from making a song for my own glory out of 
the words of other people. No! The true 
nioliy^e of my selection lies in quite a different 
trait. I have always had a propensity to jus- 
tify my action. Not to defend. To justify. 
Not to insist that I was right but simply to ex- 
plain that there was no perverse intention, no 
secret scorn for the natural sensibilities of 
mankind at the bottom of my impulses. 

[641 



TO "THE SECRET AGENT" 

That kind of weakness is dangerous only so 
far that it exposes one to the risk of becoming a 
bore; for the world generally is not interested 
in the motives of any overt act but in its 
consequences. Man may smile and smile 
but he is not an investigating animal. He 
loves the obvious. He shrinks from explana- 
tions. Yet I will go on with mine. It's 
obvious that I need not have written that 
book. I was under no necessity to deal with 
that subject; using the word subject both 
in the sense of the tale itself and in the larger 
one of a special manifestation in the life of 
mankind. This I fully admit. But the thought 
of elaborating mere ugliness in order to shock, 
or even simply to surprise my readers by a 
change of front, has nev er ent ered my head. 
In making this statement I expect to be be- 
lieved, not only on the evidence of my general 
character but also for the reason, which any- 
body can see, that the whole treatment of the 
tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying 
pity and contempt, prove my detachment 
from the squalor and sordidness which lie 
simply in the outward circumstances of the 
setting. 

The inception of "The Secret Agent" 
[65 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

followed immediately on a two years' period 
of intense absorption in the task of writing 
that remote novel, "Nostromo," with its 
far off Latin- American atmosphere; and the 
profoundly personal "Mirror of the Sea." 
The first an intense creative effort on what I 
suppose will always remain my largest canvas, 
the second an unreserved attempt to unveil for 
a moment the profounder intimacies of the sea 
and the formative influences of nearly half 
my life-time. It was a period, too, in which 
my sense of the truth of things was attended 
by a very intense imaginative and emotional 
readiness which, all genuine and faithful to 
facts as it was, yet made me feel (the task once 
done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst 
mere husks of sensations and lost in a world 
of other, of inferior, values. 

I don't know whether I really felt that I 
wanted a change, change in my imagination, 
in my vision and in my mental attitude. I 
rather think that a change in the fundamental 
mood had already stolen over me unawares. I 
don't remember anything definite happening. 
With "The Mirror of the Sea" finished in the 
full consciousness that I had dealt honestly 
with myself and my readers in every line of 

[66 1 



TO "THE SECRET AGENT" 

that book, I gave myself up to a not unhappy 
pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, 
as it were, and certainly not thinking of going 
out of my way to look for anything ugly, the 
subject of "The Secret Agent" — I mean the 
tale — came to me in the shape of a few words 
uttered by a friend in a casual conversation 
about anarchists or rather anarchist activities ; 
how brought about I don't remember now. 

I remember, however, remarking on the 
criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, 
action, mentality; and on the contemptible 
aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen 
cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and 
passionate credulities of a mankind always so 
tragically eager for self-destruction. That 
was what made for me its philosophical pre- 
tences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to 
particular instances, we recalled the already 
old story of the attempt to blow up the 
Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained in- 
anity of' so fatuous a kind that it was im- 
possible to fathom its origin by any reasonable 
or even unreasonable process of thought. For 
perverse unreason has its own logical processes. 
But that outrage could not be laid hold of 
mentally in any sort of way, so that one re- 

[67 1 



AUTHOR^S NOTE 

mained faced by the fact of a man blown to 
bits for nothing even most remotely resembling 
an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer 
wall of the Observatory it did not show as 
much as the faintest crack. 

I pointed all this out to my friend who re- 
mained silent for a while and then remarked 
in his characteristically casual and omniscient 
manner: "Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. 
His sister committed suicide afterwards." 
These were absolutely the only words that 
passed between us ; for extreme surprise at this 
unexpected piece of information kept me 
dumb for a moment and he began at once to 
talk of something else. It never occurred to 
me later to ask how he arrived at his knowl- 

^^^^ . ^ ^ edge. I am sure that if he had seen once in 
(Uv*fK.s •. 0- his life the back of an anarchist that must 

^^^ nAw^W^< have been the whole extent of his connection 
with the underworld. He was, however, a 
man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, 
and he may have gathered those illuminating 
facts at second or third hand, from a crossing- 
sweeper, from a retired police officer, from 
some vague man in his club, or even, perhaps, 
from a Minister of State met at some public or 
private reception. 

[68 1 






M 



TO "THE SECRET AGENT" 

Of the illuminating quality there could be no 
doubt whatever. One felt like walking out of 
a forest on to a plain — ^there was not much to 
see but one had plenty of light. No, there 
was not much to see and, frankly, for a con- 
siderable time I didn't even attempt to per- 
ceive anything. It was only the illuminating 
impression that remained. It remained satis- 
factory but in a passive way. Then, about a 
week later, I came upon a book which as far 
as I know had never attained any prominence, 
the rather summary recollections of an Assist- 
ant Commissioner of Police, an obviously able 
man with a strong religious strain in his 
character who was appointed to his post at 
the time of the dynamite outrages in London, 
away back in the eighties. The book was 
fairly interesting, very discreet of course; 
and I have by now forgotten the bulk of its 
contents. It contained no revelations, it ran 
over the surface agreeably, and that was all. 
I won't even try to explain why I should have 
been arrested by a little passage of about 
seven lines, in which the author (I believe his 
name was Anderson) reproduced a short 
dialogue held in the Lobby of the House of 
Commons after some unexpected anarchist 

[69 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

outrage, with the Home Secretary. I think 
it was Sir Wilham Harcourt then. He was 
very much irritated and the official was very 
apologetic. The phrase, amongst the three 
which passed between them, that struck me 
most was Sir W. Harcourt's angry sally: 
"All that's very well. But your idea of 
secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping 
the Home Secretary in the dark." Char- 
acteristic enough of Sir W. Harcourt's temper 
but not much in itself. There must have 
been, however, some sort of atmosphere in the 
whole incident because all of a sudden I felt 
myself stimulated. And then ensued in my 
mind what a student of chemistry would best 
understand from the analogy of the addition 
of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, pre- 
cipitating the process of crystallization in a 
test tube containing some colourless solution. 
It was at first for me a mental change, 
disturbing a quieted-down imagination, in 
which strange forms, sharp in outline but im- 
perfectly apprehended, appeared and claimed 
attention as crystals will do by their bizarre 
and unexpected shapes. One fell to musing 
before the phenomenon — even of the past : of 
South America, a continent of crude sunshine 

[70 1 



TO "THE SECRET AGENT" 

and brutal revolutions, of the sea, the vast 
expanse of salt waters, the mirror of heaven's 
frowns and smiles, the reflector of the world's 
light. Then the vision of an enormous town 
presented itself, of a monstrous town more 
populous than some continents and in its 
man-made might as if indifferent to heaven's 
frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the 
world's light. There was room enough there 
to place any story, depth enough there for any 
passion, variety enough there for any setting, 
darkness enough to bury five millions of lives. 
Irresistibly the town became the back- 
ground for the ensuing period of deep and 
tentative meditations. Endless vistas opened 
before me in various directions. It would 
take years to find the right way! It seemed 
to take years! . . . Slowly the dawning 
conviction of Mrs. Verloc's maternal passion 
grew up to a flame between me and that 
background, tingeing it with its secret ardour 
and receiving from it in exchange some of its 
own sombre colouring. At last the story of 
Winnie Verloc stood out complete from the 
days of her childhood to the end, unpro- 
portioned as yet, with everything still on the 
first plan, as it were; but ready now to be 

[711 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 
dealt with. It was a matter of about three 
days. 

This book is that story, reduced to manage- 
able proportions, its whole course suggested 
and centred round the absurd cruelty of the 
Greenwich Park explosion. I had there a 
task I will not say arduous but of the most 
absorbing difficulty. But it had to be done. 
It was a necessity. The figures grouped about 
Mrs. Verloc and related directly or indirectly 
to her tragic suspicion that "life doesn't 
stand much looking into," are the outcome 
of that very necessity. Personally I have 
never had any doubt of the reality of Mrs. 
Verloc's story; but it had to be disengaged 
from its obscurity in that immense town, it 
had to be made credible, I don't mean so 
much as to her soul but as to her surroundings, 
not so much as to her psychology but as to her 
humanity. For the surroundings hints were 
not lacking. I had to fight hard to keep at 
arms-length the memories of my solitary and 
nocturnal walks all over London in my early 
days, lest they should rush in and over- 
whelm each page of the story as these emerged 
one after another from a mood as serious in 
feeling and thought as any in which I ever 

[72 1 



TO "THE SECRET AGENT" 

wrote a line. In that respect I really think 
that "The Secret Agent" is a perfectly 
genuine piece of work. Even the purely 
artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic 
method to a subject of that kind, was formu- 
lated with deliberation and in the earnest 
belief that ironic treatment alone would 
enable me to say all I felt I would have to say 
in scorn as well as in pity. It is one of the 
minor satisfactions of my writing life that 
having taken that resolve I did manage, it 
seems to me, to carry it right through to the 
end. As to the personages whom the ab- 
solute necessity of the case — ^Mrs. Verloc's 
case — brings out in front of the London back- 
ground, from them, too, I obtained those 
little satisfactions which really count for so 
much against the mass of oppressive doubts 
that haunt so persistently on every attempt at 
creative work. For instance, of Mr. Vladimir 
himself (who was fair game for a caricatural 
presentation) I was gratified to hear that an 
experienced man of the world had said "that 
Conrad must have been in touch with that 
sphere or else has an excellent intuition of 
things," because Mr. Vladimir was "not only 
possible in detail but quite right in essentials." 

[73 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

Then a visitor from America informed me 
that all sorts of revolutionary refugees in 
New York would have it that the book was 
written by somebody who knew a lot about 
them. This seemed to me a very high com- 
pliment, considering that, as a matter of hard 
fact, I had seen even less of their kind than the 
omniscient friend who gave me the first sug- 
gestion for the novel. I have no doubt, how- 
ever, that there had been moments during the 
writing of the book when I was an extreme 
revolutionist, I won't say more convinced 
than they but certainly cherishing a more 
concentrated purpose than any of them had 
ever done in the whole course of his life. I 
don't say this to boast. I was simply at- 
tending to my business. In the matter of all 
my books I have always attended to my 
business. I have attended to it with complete 
self-surrender. And this statement, too, is 
not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. 
It would have bored me too much to make- 
believe. 

The suggestions for certain personages of 
the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came 
from various sources which, perhaps, here 
and there, some reader may have recognized. 

[74 1 



TO "A SET OF SIX" 

They are not very recondite. But I am not 
concerned here to legitimize any of those 
people, and even as to my general view of the 
moral reactions as between the criminal and 
the police all I will venture to say is that it 
seems to me to be at least arguable. 

The twelve years that have elapsed since 
the publication of the book have not changed 
my attitude. I do not regret having written 
it. Lately, circumstances, which have noth- 
ing to do with the general tenor of this Pref- 
ace, have compelled me to strip this tale of 
the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost 
me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. 
I have been forced, so to speak, to look upon 
its bare bones. I confess that it makes a 
grisly skeleton. But still I will submit that 
telling Winnie Verloc's story to its anarchistic 
end of utter desolation, madness and despair, 
and telling it as I have told it here, I have not 
intended to commit gratuitous outrage on the 

feelings of mankind. 

J. C. 

1920. 

* 

* * 

The six stories in this volume are the result 
of some three or four years of occasional work. 

[75 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The dates of their writing are far apart, their 
origins are various. None of them are con- 
nected directly with personal experiences. 
In all of them the facts are inherently true, 
by which I mean that they are not only pos- 
sible but that they have actually happened. 
For instance, the last story in the volume 
the one I call Pathetic, whose first title is II 
Conde (mis-spelt by-the-by) is an almost 
verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a 
very charming old gentleman whom I met in 
Italy. I don't mean to say it is only that. 
Anybody can see that it is something more 
than a verbatim report, but where he left off 
and where I began must be left to the acute 
discrimination of the reader who may be 
interested in the problem. I don't mean to 
say that the problem is worth the trouble. 
What I am certain of, however, is that it is 
not to be solved, for I am not at all clear about 
it myself by this time. All I can say is that 
the personality of the narrator was extremely 
suggestive quite apart from the story he was 
telling me. I heard a few years ago that he 
had died far away from his beloved Naples 
where that "abominable adventure" did 
really happen to him. 

[76 1 



TO "A SET OF SIX" 

Thus the genealogy of II Conde is simple. 
It is not the case with the other stories. 
Various strains contributed to their composi- 
tion, and the nature of many of those I have 
forgotten, not having the habit of making 
notes either before or after the fact. I mean 
the fact of writing a story. What I remem- 
ber best about Gaspar Ruiz is that it was 
written, or at any rate begun, within a month 
of finishing "Nostromo,"but apart from the lo- 
cality, and that a pretty wide one (all the 
South American Continent), the novel and 
the story have nothing in common, neither 
mood, nor intention and, certainly, not the 
style. The manner for the most part is that 
of General Santierra, and that old warrior, 
I note with satisfaction, is very true to him- 
self all through. Looking now dispassionately 
at the various ways in which this story could 
have been presented I can't honestly think the 
General superfluous. It is he, an old man 
talking of the days of his youth, who char- 
acterizes the whole narrative and gives it an 
air of actuality which I doubt whether I 
could have achieved without his help. In 
the mere writing his existence of course was of 
no help at all, because the whole thing had to 

[77 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

be carefully kept within the frame of his 
simple mind. But all this is but a laborious 
searching of memories. My present feeling 
is that the story could not have been told 
otherwise. The hint for Caspar Ruiz, the man, 
I found in a book by Captain Basil Hall, R. 
N., who was for some time, between the years 
1824 and 1828, senior officer of a small British 
Squadron on the West Coast of South Ame- 
rica. His book published in the thirties ob- 
tained a certain celebrity and I suppose is to 
be found still in some libraries. The curious 
who may be mistrusting my imagination are 
referred to that printed document, Vol. II, 
I forget the page, but it is somewhere not far 
from the end. Another document connected 
with this story is a letter of a biting and ironic 
kind from a friend then in Burma, passing 
certain strictures upon "the gentleman with 
the gun on his back" which I do not intend 
to make accessible to the public. Yet the 
gun episode did really happen, or at least I 
am bound to believe it because I remember it, 
described in an extremely matter-of-fact tone, 
in some book I read in my boyhood; and I 
am not going to discard the beliefs of my boy- 
hood for anybody on earth. 

[78 1 



TO "A SET OF SIX" 

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in 
the volume, is, like II Conde, associated with a 
direct narrative and based on a suggestion 
gathered on warm human lips. I will not 
disclose the real name of the criminal ship 
but the first I heard of her homicidal habits 
was from the late Captain Blake, command- 
ing a London ship in which I served in 1884 as 
Second Officer. Captain Blake was, of all 
my commanders, the one I remember with the 
greatest affection. I have sketched in his 
personahty, without however mentioning his 
name, in the first paper of "The Mirror of the 
Sea." In his young days he had had a personal 
experience of the brute and it is perhaps for 
that reason that I have put the story into the 
mouth of a young man and made of it w hat the 
reader will see. The existence of the brute 
was a fact. The end of the brute as related 
in the story is also a fact, well-known at the 
time though it really happened to another 
ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless 
character, which certainly deserved a better 
fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to the 
needs of my story thinking that I had there 
something in the nature of poetical justice. 
I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow 

[79 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

upon the general honesty of my proceedings as 
a writer of tales. 

Of The Informer and The Anarchist I will 
say next to nothing. The pedigree of these 
tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth 
disentangling at this distance of time. I 
found them and here they are. The dis- 
criminating reader will guess that I have found 
them within my mind; but how they or their 
elements came in there I have forgotten for 
the most part; and for the rest I really don't 
see why I should give myself away more than 
I have done already. 

It remains for me only now to mention The 
Duel, the longest story in the book. That 
story attained the dignity of pubhcation all 
by itself in a small illustrated volume, under 
the title, "The Point of Honour." That 
was many years ago. It has been since re- 
instated in its proper place, which is the place 
it occupies in this volume, in all the subse- 
quent editions of my work. Its pedigree is 
extremely simple. It springs from a ten-line 
paragraph in a small provincial paper pub- 
lished in the South of France. That para- 
graph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal 
ending between two well-known Parisian 

[80 1 



TO "A SET OF SIX" 

personalities, referred for some reason or other 
to the "well-known fact" of two officers in 
Napoleon's Grand Army having fought a 
series of duels in the midst of great wars and 
on some futile pretext. The pretext was 
never disclosed. I had therefore to invent 
it; and I think that, given the character of the 
two officers which I had to invent, too, I have 
made it sufficiently convincing by the mere 
force of its absurdity. The truth is that in 
my mind the story is nothing but a serious 
and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical 
fiction. I had heard in my boyhood a good 
deal of the great Napoleonic legend. I had a 
genuine feeling that I would find myself at 
home in it, and The Duel is the result of that 
feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that pre- 
sumption. Personally I have no qualms of 
conscience about this piece of work. The 
story might have been better told of course. 
All one's work might have been better done; 
but this is the sort of reflection a worker must 
put aside courageously if he doesn't mean 
every one of his conceptions to remain for ever 
a private vision, an evanescent reverie. How 
many of those visions have I seen vanish in 
my time! This one, however, has remained, 

[811 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a 
proof of my rashness. What I care to re- 
member best is the testimony of some French 
readers who volunteered the opinion that in 
those hundred pages or so I had managed to 
render "wonderfully" the spirit of the whole 
epoch. Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; 
but even so I hug it still to my breast, because 
in truth that is exactly what I was trying to 
capture in my small net: the Spirit of the 
Epoch — never purely militarist in the long 
clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its 
exaltation of sentiment — naively heroic in its 
faith. 

J. C. 

1920. 



It must be admitted that by the mere force 
of circumstances "Under Western Eyes" 
has become already a sort of historical novel 
dealing with the past. "'"'""""'" '"'"*""'~"' "" 

This reflection bears entirely upon the 
events of the tale; but being as a whole an 
attempt to render not so much the pohtical 
state as the psychology of Russia itself, I 
venture to hope that it has not lost all its in- 

[82 1 



TO "UNDER WESTERN EYES" 

terest. I am encouraged in this flattering be- 
lief by noticing that in many articles on 
Russian affairs of the present day reference is 
made to certain sayings and opinions uttered 
in the pages that follow, in a manner testify- 
ing to the clearness of my vision and the 
correctness of my judgment. I need not say 
that in writing this novel I had no other 
object in view than to express imaginatively 
the general truth which underlies its action, 
together with my honest convictions as to 
the moral complexion of certain facts more or 
less known to the whole world. 

As to the actual creation I may say that 
when I began to write I had a distinct con- 
ception of the first part only, with the three 
figures of Haldin, Razumov, and Councillor 
Mikulin, defined exactly in my mind. It was 
only after I had finished writing the first part 
that the whole story revealed itself to me in 
its tragic character and in the march of its 
events as unavoidable and sufficiently ample 
in its outline to give free play to my creative 
instinct and to the dramatic possibilities of 
the subject. 

The course of action need not be explained. 
It has suggested itself more as a matter of 

[83] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

feeling than a matter of thinking. It is the j 
result not of a special experience but of gen- 
eral knowledge, fortified by earnest medita- 
tion. My greatest anxiety was in being able 
to strike and sustain the note of scrupulous 
fairness. The obligation of absolute fairness 
was imposed on me historically and heredi- 
tarily, by the peculiar experience of race and 
family, and, in addition, by my primary con- 
viction that truth alone is the justification of 
any fiction which can make the least claim 
to the quality of art or may hope to take its 
place in the culture of men and women of its 
time. I had never been called before to a 
greater effort of detachment: detachment 
from all passions, prejudices and even from 
personal memories. "Under Western Eyes" 
on its first appearance in England was a 
failure with the public, perhaps because of 
that very detachment. I obtained my re- 
ward some six years later when I first heard 
that the book had found universal recognition 
in Russia and had been re-published there in 
many editions. _J 

The various figures playing their part in the 
story also owe their existence to no special 
experience but to the general knowledge of the 

[84] 



TO ''UNDER WESTERN EYES" 

condition of Russia and of the moral and emo- 
tional reactions of the Russian temperament 
to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness, 
which, in general human terms, could be re- 
duced to the formula of senseless desperation 
provoked by senseless tyranny. What I was 
concerned with mainly was the aspect, the 
character, and the fate of the individuals as 
they appeared to the Western Eyes of the 
old teacher of languages. He himself has 
been much criticized ; but I will not at this late 
hour undertake to justify his existence. He 
was useful to me and therefore I think that he 
must be useful to the reader both in the way 
of comment and by the part he plays in the 
development of the story. In my desire to 
produce the effect of actuality it seemed to me 
indispensable to have an eye-witness of the 
transactions in Geneva. I needed also a 
sympathetic friend for Miss Haldin, who 
otherwise would have been too much alone and 
unsupported to be perfectly credible. She 
would have had no one to whom she could give 
a glimpse of her idealistic faith, of her great 
heart, and of her simple emotions. 

Razumov is treated sympathetically. Why 
should he not bei^ He is an ordinary young 

[85 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

man, with a healthy capacity for work and 
sane ambitions. He has an average con- 
science. If he is sHghtly abnormal it is only 
in his sensitiveness to his position. Being 
nobody's child he feels rather more keenly 
than another would that he is a Russian — or 
he is nothing. He is perfectly right in looking 
on all Russia as his heritage. The sanguinary 
futility of the crimes and the sacrifices seeth- 
ing in that amorphous mass envelops and 
crushes him. But I don't think that in his 
distraction he is ever monstrous. Nobody is 
exhibited as a monster here — neither the 
simple-minded Tekla nor the wrong-headed 
Sophia Antonovna. Peter Ivanovitch and 
Madame de S. are fair game. They are the 
apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as 
their grimaces deserve. As to Nikita — nick- 
named Necator — he is the perfect flower of the 
terroristic wilderness. What troubled me 
most in dealing with him was not his mon- 
strosity but his banality. He has been ex- 
hibited to the public eye for years in so- 
called "disclosures" in newspaper articles, in 
secret histories, in sensational novels. 

The most terrifying reflection (I am speak- 
ing now for myself) is that all these people are 

[86 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

not the product of the exceptional but of the 
general — of the normality of their place, and 
time, and race. The ferocity and imbecility 
of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and 
in fact basing itself upon complete moral 
anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and 
atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolu- 
tionism encompassing destruction by the first 
means to hand, in the strange conviction that 
a fundamental change of hearts must follow 
the downfall of any given human institutions. 
These people are unable to see that all they 
can effect is merely a change of names. The 
oppressors and the oppressed are all Russians 
together; and the world is brought once more 
face to face with the truth of the saying that 
the tiger cannot change his stripes nor the 
leopard his spots. 

J. C. 
1920. 



The re-issue of this book in a new form does 
not, strictly speaking, require another Preface. 
Rut since this is distinctly a place for personal 
remarks I take the opportunity to refer in this 

[87 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

Author's Note to two points arising from 
certain statements about myself I have noticed 
of late in the press. 

One of them bears upon the question of 
language. I have always felt myself looked 
upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, 
a position which outside the circus world can- 
not be regarded as desirable. It needs a 
special temperament for one to derive much 
gratification from the fact of being able to do 
freakish things intentionally, and, as it were, 
from mere vanity. 

The fact of my not writing in my native 
language has been of course commented upon 
frequently in reviews and notices of my 
various works and in the more extended 
critical articles. I suppose that was unavoid- 
able; and indeed these comments were of the 
most flattering kind to one's vanity. But in 
that matter I have no vanity that could be 
flattered. I could not have it. The first 
object of this Note is to disclaim any merit 
there might have been in an act of deliberate 
volition. 

The impression of my having exercised a 
choice between the two languages, French and 
English, both foreign to me, has got abroad 

f 88 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

somehow. That impression is erroneous. It 
originated, I beheve, in an article written by 
Sir Hugh CHfford and pubhshed in the year 
'98, I think, of the last century. Some time 
before, Sir Hugh Clifford came to see me. He 
is, if not the first, then one of the first two 
friends I made for myself by my work, the 
other being Mr. Cunninghame Graham, who, 
characteristically enough, had been captivated 
by my story An Outpost of Progress. These 
friendships which have endured to this day I 
count amongst my precious possessions. 

Mr. Hugh Clifford (he was not decorated 
then) had just pubhshed his first volume of 
Malay sketches. I was naturally delighted 
to see him and infinitely gratified by the kind 
things he found to say about my first books 
and some of my early short stories, the action 
of which is placed in the Malay Archipelago. 
I remember that after saying many things 
which ought to have made me blush to the 
roots of my hair with outraged modesty, 
he ended by telling me with the uncompromis- 
ing yet kindly firmness of a man accustomed 
to speak unpalatable truths even to Oriental 
potentates (for their own good of course) 
that as a matter of fact I didn't know any- 

[89 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

thing about Malays. I was perfectly aware 
of this. I have never pretended to any such 
knowledge, and I was moved — I wonder to 
this day at my impertinence — to retort: "Of 
course I don't know anything about Malays. 
If I knew only one hundredth part of what 
you and Frank Swettenham know of Malays 
I would make everybody sit up." He went 
on looking kindly (but firmly) at me and 
then we both burst out laughing. In the 
course of that most welcome visit twenty 
years ago, which I remember so well, we talked 
of many things ; the characteristics of various 
languages was one of them, and it is on that 
day that my friend carried away with him 
the impression that I had exercised a de- 
liberate choice between French and English. 
Later, when moved by his friendship (no 
empty word to him) to write a study in the 
North American Review on Joseph Conrad he 
conveyed that impression to the public. 

This misapprehension, for it is nothing else, 
was no doubt my fault. I must have ex- 
pressed myself badly in the course of a friendly 
and intimate talk when one doesn't watch 
one's phrases carefully. My recollection of 
what I meant to say is : that had I been under 

[90 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

the necessity of making a choice between the 
two, and though I knew French fairly well 
and was familiar with it from infancy, I 
would have been afraid to attempt expression 
in a language so perfectly "crystallized." 
This, I believe, was the word I used. And 
then we passed to other matters. I had to 
tell him a little about myself; and what he 
told me of his work in the East, his own par- 
ticular East of which I had but the mistiest, 
short glimpse, was of the most absorbing in- 
terest. The present Governor of Nigeria 
may not remember that conversation as well 
as I do, but I am sure that he will not mind 
this, what in diplomatic language is called 
"rectification" of a statement made to him 
by an obscure writer his generous sympathy 
had prompted him to seek out and make his 
friend. 

The truth of the matter is that my faculty 
to write in English is as natural as any other 
aptitude with which I might have been born. 
I have a strange and overpowering feeling 
that it had always been an inherent part of 
myself. English was for me neither a mat- 
ter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea 
of choice had never entered my head. And 

[91] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

as to adoption — well, yes, there was adoption ; 
but it was I who was adopted by the genius 
of the language, which directly I came out of 
the stammering stage made me its own so 
completely that its very idioms I truly believe 
had a direct action on my temperament and 
fashioned my still plastic character. 

It was a very intimate action and for that 
very reason it is too mysterious to explain. 
The task would be as impossible as trying to 
explain love at first sight. There was some- 
thing in this conjunction of exulting, almost 
physical recognition, the same sort of emo- 
tional surrender and the same pride of pos- 
session, all united in the wonder of a great 
discovery; but there was on it none of that 
shadow of dreadful doubt that falls on the 
very flame of our perishable passions. One 
knew very well that this was for ever. 

A matter of discovery and not of inheri- 
tance, that very inferiority of the title makes 
the faculty still more precious, lays the pos- 
sessor under a lifelong obligation to remain 
worthy of his great fortune. But it seems to 
me that all this sounds as if I were trying to 
explain — a task which I have just pronounced 
to be impossible. If in action we may admit 

[92] 



TO *'A PERSONAL RECORD" 

with awe that the Impossible recedes before 
men's indomitable spirit, the Impossible in 
matters of analysis will always make a stand 
at some point or other. All I can claim after 
all those years of devoted practice, with the 
accumulated anguish of its doubts, imper- 
fections and falterings in my heart, is the right 
to be believed when I say that if I had not 
written in English I would not have written 
at all. 

The other remark which I wish to make here 
is also a rectification but of a less direct kind. 
It has nothing to do with the medium of 
expression. It bears on the matter of my 
authorship in another way. It is not for 
me to criticize my judges, the more so because 
I always felt that I was receiving more than 
justice at their hands. But it seems to me 
that their unfailingly interested sympathy has 
ascribed to racial and historical influences 
much, of what, I believe, appertains simply to 
the individual. Nothing is more foreign than 
what in the literary world is called Sclavon- 
ism, to the Polish temperament with its 
tradition of self-government, its chivalrous 
view of moral restraints and an exaggerated 
respect for individual rights : not to mention 

[93] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

the important fact that the whole PoHsh 
mentahty, Western in complexion, had re- 
ceived its training from Italy and France and, 
historically, had always remained, even in 
religious matters, in sympathy with the most 
liberal currents of European thought. An 
impartial view of humanity in all its degrees of 
splendour and misery together with a special 
regard for the rights of the unprivileged of this 
earth, not on any mystic ground but on the 
ground of simple fellowship and honourable 
reciprocity of services, was the dominant 
characteristic of the mental and moral at- 
mosphere of the houses which sheltered my 
hazardous childhood: — matters of calm and 
deep conviction both lasting and consistent, 
and removed as far as possible from that 
humanitarianism that seems to be merely a 
matter of crazy nerves or a morbid con- 
science. 

One of the most sympathetic of my critics 
tried to account for certain characteristics of 
my work by the fact of my being, in his own 
words, "the son of a Revolutionist." No 
epithet could be more inapplicable to a man 
with such a strong sense of responsibility in 
the region of ideas and action and so indiffer- 

[94 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

ent to the promptings of personal ambition as 
my father. Why the description "revolu- 
tionary" should have been applied all through 
Europe to the Polish risings of 1831 and 1863 
I really cannot understand. These risings 
were purely revolts against foreign domina- 
tion. The Russians themselves called them 
"rebellions," which, from their point of view, 
was the exact truth. Amongst the men 
concerned in the preliminaries of the 1863 
movement my father was no more revolution- 
ary than the others, in the sense of working 
for the subversion of any social or political 
scheme of existence. He was simply a patriot 
in the sense of a man who believing in the 
spiritualtiy of a national existence could not 
bear to see that spirit enslaved. 

Called out publicly in a kindly attempt to 
justify the work of the son, that figure of my 
past cannot be dismissed without a few more 
words. As a child of course I knew very little 
of my father's activities, for I was not quite 
twelve when he died. What I saw with my 
own eyes was the public funeral, the cleared 
streets, the hushed crowds; but I understood 
perfectly well that this was a manifestation 
of the national spirit seizing a worthy occasion. 

[95 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

That bareheaded mass of work people, youths 
of the University, women at the windows, 
school-boys on the pavement, could have 
known nothing positive about him except the 
fame of his fidelity to the one guiding emotion 
in their hearts. I had nothing but that 
knowledge myself; and this great silent demon- 
stration seemed to me the most natural tribute 
in the world — not to the man but to the Idea. 

What had impressed me much more in- 
timately was the burning of his manuscripts a 
fortnight or so before his death. It was done 
under his own superintendence. I happened 
to go into his room a little earlier than usual 
that evening, and remaining unnoticed stayed 
to watch the nursing-sister feeding the blaze 
in the fireplace. My father sat in a deep arm- 
chair propped up with pillows. This is the last 
time I saw him out of bed. His aspect was 
to me not so much that of a man desperately 
ill, as mortally weary — a vanquished man. 
That act of destruction affected me profoundly 
by its air of surrender. Not before death, 
however. To a man of such strong faith death 
could not have been an enemy. 

For many years I believed that every scrap 
of his writings had been burnt, but in July of 

[96 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

1914 the Librarian of the University of 
Cracow caUing on me during our short visit 
to Poland, mentioned the existence of a few 
manuscripts of my father and^ especially of a 
series of letters written before and during his 
exile to his most intimate friend who had sent 
them to the University for preservation. I 
went to the Library at once, but had only 
time then for a mere glance. I intended to 
come back next day and arrange for copies 
being made of the whole correspondence. But 
next day there was war. So perhaps I shall 
never know now what he wrote to his most 
intimate friend in the time of his domestic 
happiness, of his new paternity, of his strong 
hopes — and later, in the hours of disillusion, 
bereavement and gloom. 

I had also imagined him to be completely 
forgotten forty -five years after his death. 
But this was not the case. Some young men 
of letters had discovered him, mostly as a 
remarkable translator of Shakespeare, Victor 
Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, to whose drama 
Chatterton, translated by himself, he had 
written an eloquent Preface defending the 
poet's deep humanity and his ideal of noble 
stoicism. The political side of his life was 

[97] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

being recalled too; for some men of his time, 
his co-workers in the task of keeping the 
national spirit firm in the hope of an inde- 
pendent future, had been in their old age 
publishing their memoirs, where the part 
he played was for the first time publicly dis- 
closed to the world. I learned then of things 
in his life I never knew before, things which 
outside the group of the initiated could have 
been known to no living being except my 
mother. It was thus that from a volume of 
posthumous memoirs dealing with those bitter 
years I learned the fact that the first inception 
of the secret National Committee intended 
primarily to organize moral resistance to the 
augmented pressure of Russianism arose on 
my father's initiative, and that its first meet- 
ings were held in our Warsaw house, of which 
all I remember distinctly is one room, white 
and crimson, probably the drawing room. 
In one of its walls there was the loftiest of all 
archways. Where it led to remains a mystery, 
but to this day I cannot get rid of the belief 
that all this was of enormous proportions, and 
that the people appearing and disappearing 
in that immense space were beyond the usual 
stature of mankind as I got to know it in later 

[98] 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

life. Amongst them I remember my mother, 
a more famihar figure than the others, dressed 
in the black of the national mourning worn in 
defiance of ferocious police regulations. I have 
also preserved from that particular time the awe 
of her mysterious gravity which, indeed, was 
by no means smileless. For I remember her 
smiles, too. Perhaps for me she could always 
find a smile. She was young then, certainly not 
thirty yet. She died four years later in exile. 

In the pages which follow I mentioned her 
visit to her brother's house about a year be- 
fore her death. I also speak a little of my 
father as I remember him in the years follow- 
ing what was for him the deadly blow of her 
loss. And now, having been again evoked in 
answer to the words of a friendly critic, these 
Shades may be allowed to return to their 
place of rest where their forms in life linger 
yet, dim but poignant, and awaiting the 
moment when their haunting reality, their 
last trace on earth, shall pass for ever with 
me out of the world. 

1919. J. C. 



99 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

A FAMILIAR PREFACE 

As A general rule we do not want much en- 
couragement to talk about ourselves; yet this 
little book is the result of a friendly suggestion, 
and even of a little friendly pressure. I de- 
fended myself with some spirit; but, with 
characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice in- 
sisted, "You know, you really must." 

It was not an argument, but I submitted 
at once. If one must ! . . . 

You perceive the force of a word. He who 
wants to persuade should put his trust not in 
the right argument, but in the right word. 
The power of sound has always been greater 
than the power of sense. I don't say this 
by way of disparagement. It is better for 
mankind to be impressionable than reflective. 
Nothing humanely great — great, I mean, as 
affecting a whole mass of lives — has come from 
reflection. On the other hand, you cannot 
fail to see the power of mere words; such 
words as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I 
won't mention any more. They are not far 
to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with 
ardour, with conviction, these two by their 
sound alone have set whole nations in mo- 
f 100 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

tion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on 
which rests our whole social fabric. There's 
"virtue" for you if you like! ... Of 
course the accent must be attended to. The 
right accent. That's very important. The 
capacious lung, the thundering or the tender 
vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your 
Archimedes ' lever. He was an absent-minded 
person with a mathematical imagination. 
Mathematics commands all my respect, but 
I have no use for engines. Give me the right 
word and the right accent and I will move the 
world. 

What a dream for a writer! Because writ- 
ten words have their accent, too. Yes! Let 
me only find the right word! Surely it must 
be lying somewhere among the wreckage of all 
the plaints and all the exultations poured 
out aloud since the first day when hope, the 
undying, came down on earth. It may be 
there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at 
hand. But it's no good. I believe there are 
men who can lay hold of a needle in a pottle of 
hay at the first try. For myself, I have never 
had such luck. 

And then there is that accent. Another 
difficulty. For who is going to tell whether 
f 1011 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

the accent is right or wrong till the word is 
shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and 
goes down-wind, leaving the world unmoved? 
Once upon a time there lived an emperor who 
was a sage and something of a literary man. 
He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, 
maxims, reflections which chance has pre- 
served for the edification of posterity. Among 
other sayings — I am quoting from memory — 
I remember this solemn admonition: "Let 
all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." 
The accent of heroic truth ! This is very fine, 
but I am thinking that it is an easy matter for 
an austere emperor to jot down grandiose ad- 
vice. Most of the working truths on this 
earth are humble, not heroic; and there have 
been times in the history of mankind when the 
accents of heroic truth have moved it to 
nothing but derision. 

Nobody will expect to find between the cov- 
ers of this little book words of extraordinary 
potency or accents of irresistible heroism. 
However humiliating for my self-esteem, I 
must confess that the counsels of Marcus 
Aurelius are not for me. They are more 
fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth 
of a modest sort I can promise you, and also 

[102 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sin- 
cerity which, while it delivers one into the 
hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to 
embroil one with one's friends. 

"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an ex- 
pression. I can't imagine among either my 
enemies or my friends a being so hard up for 
something to do as to quarrel with me. "To 
disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the 
mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the 
writing period of my life have come to me 
through my books ; and I know that a novelist 
lives in his work. He stands there, the only 
reality in an invented world, among imagi- 
nary things, happenings, and people. Writ- 
ing about them, he is only writing about him- 
self. But the disclosure is not complete. He 
remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind 
the veil; a suspected rather than a seen pres- 
ence — a movement and a voice behind the 
draperies of fiction. In these personal notes 
there is no such veil. And I cannot help 
thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of 
Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew 
life so profoundly, says that "there are persons 
esteemed on their reputation who by showing 
themselves destroy the opinion one had of 

[103 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

them." This is the danger incurred by an 
author of fiction who sets out to talk about 
himself without disguise. 

While these reminiscent pages were ap- 
pearing serially I was remonstrated with for 
bad economy ; as if such writing were a form of 
self-indulgence wasting the substance of future 
volumes. It seems that I am not sufficiently 
literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a 
line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring 
himself to look upon his existence and his 
experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, 
sensations, and emotions, upon his memories 
and his regrets, and the whole possession of his 
past, as only so much material for his hands. 
Once before, some three years ago, when I 
published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume 
of impressions and memories, the same re- 
marks were made to me. Practical remarks. 
But, truth to say, I have never understood the 
kind of thrift they recommend. I wanted to 
pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, 
to whom I remain indebted for so much which 
has gone to make me what I am. That 
seemed to me the only shape in which I could 
offer it to their shades. There could not be a 
question in my mind of anything else. It is 
[104 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

quite possible that I am a bad economist; but 
it is certain that I am incorrigible. 

Having matured in the surroundings and 
under the special conditions of sea life, I have a 
special piety towards that form of my past; 
for its impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, 
its demands such as could be responded to with 
the natural elation of youth and strength 
equal to the call. There was nothing in them 
to perplex a young conscience. Having broken 
away from my origins under a storm of blame 
from every quarter which had the merest 
shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed 
by great distances from such natural affec- 
tions as were still left to me, and even es- 
tranged, in a measure, from them by the 
totally unintelligible character of the life 
which had seduced me so mysteriously from 
my allegiance, I may safely say that through 
the bhnd force of circumstances the sea 
was to be all my world and the merchant ser- 
vice my only home for a long succession of 
years. No wonder, then, that in my two 
exclusively sea books — "The Nigger of the 
Narcissus,'' and "The Mirror of the Sea" 
(and in the few short sea stories hke "Youth" 
and "Typhoon") — I have tried with an 
[105 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

almost filial regard to render the vibration of 
life in the great world of waters, in the hearts 
of the simple men who have for ages traversed 
its solitudes, and also that something sentient 
which seems to dwell in ships — the creatures 
of their hands and the objects of their care. 

One's Hterary life must turn frequently for 
sustenance to memories and seek discourse 
with the shades, unless one has made up one's 
mind to write only in order to reprove man- 
kind for what it is, or praise it for what it 
is not, or — generally — to teach it how to be- 
have. Being neither quarrelsome, nor a flat- 
terer, nor a sage, I have done none of these 
things, and I am prepared to put up serenely 
with the insignificance which attaches to 
persons who are not meddlesome in some way 
or other. But resignation is not indifference. 
I would not hke to be left standing as a mere 
spectator on the bank of the great stream 
carrying onward so many lives. I would fain 
claim for myself the faculty of so much in- 
sight as can be expressed in a voice of sym- 
pathy and compassion. 

It seems to me that in one, at least, au- 
thoritative quarter of criticism I am suspected 
of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of 
[106 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

facts — of what the French would call secheresse 
du coeur. Fifteen years of unbroken silence 
before praise or blame testify sufficiently to 
my respect for criticism, that fine flower of 
personal expression in the garden of letters. 
But this is more of a personal matter, reaching 
the man behind the work, and therefore it may 
be alluded to in a volume which is a personal 
note in the margin of the public page. Not 
that I feel hurt in the least. The charge — 
if it amounted to a charge at all — was made 
in the most considerate terms ; in a tone of re- 
gret. 

My answer is that if it be true that every 
novel contains an element of autobiography 
— and this can hardly be denied, since the 
creator can only express himself in his crea- 
tion — ^then there are some of us to whom an 
open display of sentiment is repugnant. I 
would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. 
It is often merely temperamental. But it is 
not always a sign of coldness. It may be 
pride. There can be nothing more humiliat- 
ing than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss 
the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing - 
more humiliating! And this for the reason 
that should the mark be missed, should the 
[107 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

open display of emotion fail to move, then it 
must perish unavoidably in disgust or con- 
tempt. No artist can be reproached for 
shrinking from a risk which only fools run to 
meet and only genius dare confront with im- 
punity. In a task which mainly consists in 
laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, 
a regard for decency, even at the cost of 
success, is but the regard for one's own dignity 
which is inseparably united with the dignity 
of one's work. 

And then — it is very difficult to be wholly 
joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The 
comic, when it is human, soon takes upon it- 
self a face of pain; and some of our griefs 
(some only, not all, for it is the capacity for 
suffering which makes man august in the eyes 
of men) have their source in weaknesses which 
must be recognized with smiling compassion 
as the common inheritance of us all. Joy 
and sorrow in this world pass into each other, 
mingling their forms and their murmurs in the 
twilight of life as mysterious as an overshad- 
owed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of 
supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, 
on the distant edge of the horizon. 

Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic 
[108 1 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

wand giving that command over laughter and 
tears which is declared to be the highest 
achievement of imaginative literature. Only, 
to be a great magician one must surrender one- 
self to occult and irresponsible powers, either 
outside or within one's breast. We have all 
heard of simple men selling their souls for love 
or power to some grotesque devil. The most 
ordinary intelligence can perceive without 
much reflection that anything of the sort is 
bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay 
claim to particular wisdom because of my 
dislike and distrust of such transactions. It 
may be my sea training acting upon a natural 
disposition to keep good hold on the one thing 
really mine, but the fact is that I have a 
positive horror of losing even for one moving 
moment that full possession of myself which 
is the first condition of good service. And I 
have carried my notion of good service from my 
earlier into my later existence. I, who have 
never sought in the written word anything 
else but a form of the Beautiful — I have 
carried over that article of creed from the 
decks of ships to the more circumscribed 
space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, 
I have become permanently imperfect in the 
[109 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

eyes of the ineffable company of pure 
esthetes. 

As in poHtical so in hterary action a man 
wins friends for himself mostly by the passion 
of his prejudices and by the consistent narrow- 
ness of his outlook. But I have never been 
able to love what was not lovable or hate 
what was not hateful out of deference for some 
general principle. Whether there be any 
courage in making this admission I know not. 
After the middle turn of life's way we consider 
dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I 
proceed in peace to declare that I have always 
suspected in the effort to bring into play the 
extremities of emotions the debasing touch of 
insincerity. In order to move others deeply 
we must deliberately allow ourselves to be 
carried away beyond the bounds of our normal 
sensibility — innocently enough, perhaps, and 
of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice 
on the stage above the pitch of natural con- 
versation — but still we have to do that. And 
surely this is no great sin. But the danger 
lies in the writer becoming the victim of his 
own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of 
sincerity, and in the end coming to despise 
truth itself as something too cold, too blunt 
f 110 1 



TO ''A PERSONAL RECORD" 

for his purpose — as, in fact, not good enough 
for his insistent emotion. From laughter and 
tears the descent is easy to snivelHng and gig- 
gles. 

These may seem selfish considerations; but 
you can't, in sound morals, condemn a man 
taking care of his own integrity. It is his 
clear duty. And least of all can you con- 
demn an artist pursuing, however humbly 
and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that 
interior world where his thought and his 
emotions go seeking for the experience of 
imagined adventures, there are no policemen, 
no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread 
of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who 
then is going to say Nay to his temptations 
if not his conscience .f^ 

And besides — ^this, remember, is the place 
and the moment of perfectly open talk — I 
think that all ambitions are lawful except those 
which climb upward on the miseries or cre- 
dulities of mankind. All intellectual and ar- 
tistic ambitions are permissible, up to and 
even beyond the hmit of prudent sanity. 
They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then 
so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as 
virtue is said to be, such ambitions are their 
f 1111 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

own reward. Is it such a very mad presump- 
tion to believe in the sovereign power of one's 
art, to try for other means, for other ways of 
affirming this behef in the deeper appeal of one's 
work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. 
An historian of hearts is not an historian of 
emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained 
as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very 
fount of laughter and tears. The sight of 
human affairs deserves admiration and pity. 
They are worthy of respect, too. And he is 
not insensible who pays them the undemon- 
strative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, 
and of a smile which is not a grin. Resigna- 
tion, not mystic, not detached, but resignation 
open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, 
is the only one of our feelings for which it is 
impossible to become a sham. 

Not that I think resignation the last word of 
wisdom. I am too much the creature of my 
time for that. But I think that the proper 
wisdom is to will what the gods will without, 
perhaps, being certain what their will is — 
or even if they have a will of their own. And 
in this matter of life and art it is not the Why 
that matters so much to our happiness as the 
How. As the Frenchman said, "/Z y a 
[n2i 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 

toujour s la maniere.'' Very true. Yes. There 
is the manner. The manner in laughter, in 
tears, in irony, in indignations and enthu- 
siasms, in judgments — and even in love. The 
manner in which, as in the features and char- 
acter of a human face, the inner truth is fore- 
shadowed for those who know how to look at 
their kind. 

Those who read me know my conviction 
that the world, the temporal world, rests on a 
few very simple ideas; so simple that they 
must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, 
among others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a 
time when nothing which iTnoTrevolutionary 
in some way or other can expect to attract 
much attention I have not been revolutionary 
in my writings. The revolutionary spirit 
is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one 
from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, 
absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind 
by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance 
it contains. No doubt one should smile at 
these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no 
better Philosopher. All claim to special right- 
eousness awakens in me that scorn and dan- 
ger from which a philosophical mind should be 
free. . . . 

f 113 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

I fear that trying to be conversational I 
have only managed to be unduly discursive. 
I have never been very well acquainted with 
the art of conversation — that art which, I 
understand, is supposed to be lost now. My 
young days, the days when one's habits and 
character are formed, have been rather famil- 
iar with long silences. Such voices as broke 
into them were anything but conversational. 
No. I haven't got the habit. Yet this dis- 
cursiveness is not so irrelevant to the hand- 
ful of pages which follow. They, too, have 
been charged with discursiveness, with dis- 
regard of chronological order (which is in it- 
self a crime) with unconventionality of form 
(which is an impropriety) . I was told severely 
that the public would view with displeasure 
the informal character of my recollections. 
"Alas!" I protested, mildly. "Could I begin 
with the sacramental words, 'I was born on 
such a date in such a place '.^ The remoteness 
of the locality would have robbed the state- 
ment of all interest. I haven't lived through 
wonderful adventures to be related seriatim. 
I haven't known distinguished men on whom 
I could pass fatuous remarks. I haven't 
been mixed up with great or scandalous 
f 114] 



TO "A PERSONAL RECORD" 
affairs. This is but a bit of psychological 
document, and even so, I haven't written it 
with a view to put forward any conclusion of 
my own." 

But my objector was not placated. These 
were good reasons for not writing at all — not a 
defence of what stood written already, he said. 

I admit that almost anything, anything in 
the world, would serve as a good reason for not 
writing at all. But since I have written them, 
all I want to say in their defence is that these 
memories put down without any regard for 
established conventions have not been thrown 
off without system and purpose. They have 
their hope and their aim. The hope that from 
the reading of these pages there may emerge 
at last the vision of a personality ; the man be- 
hind the books so fundamentally dissimilar 
as, for instance, "Almayer's Folly" and 
"The Secret Agent," and yet a coherent, 
justifiable personality both in its origin and in 
its action. This is the hope. The immediate 
aim, closely associated with the hope, is to 
give the record of personal memories by pre- 
senting faithfully the feelings and sensations 
connected with the writing of my first book 
and with my first contact with the sea. 
f 115 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

In the purposely mingled resonance of this 
double strain a friend here and there will 
perhaps detect a subtle accord. 

J. C. 

* 
* * 

The only bond between these three stories 
is, so to speak, geographical, for their scene, 
be it land, be it sea, is situated in the same 
region which may be called the region of the 
Indian Ocean with its ofF-shoots and pro- 
longations north of the equator even as far as 
the Gulf of Siam. In point of time they be- 
long to the period immediately after the 
publication of that novel with the awkward 
title "Under Western Eyes" and, as far as 
the life of the writer is concerned, their ap- 
pearance in a volume marks a definite change 
in the fortunes of his fiction. For there is no 
denying the fact that "Under Western Eyes" 
found no favour in the public eye, whereas 
the novel called "Chance" which followed 
"'Twixt Land and Sea" was received on its 
first appearance by many more readers than 
any other of my books. 

This volume of three tales was also well re- 
ceived, publicly and privately and from a 
[116 1 



TO '"TWIXT LAND AND SEA" 

publisher's point of view. This httle success 
was a most timely tonic for my enfeebled 
bodily frame. For this may indeed be called 
the book of a man's convalescence, at least as 
to three-fourths of it; because the Secret 
Sharer, the middle story, was written much 
earlier than the other two. 

For in truth the memories of "Under 
Western Eyes" are associated with the mem- 
ory of a severe illness which seemed to wait 
like a tiger in the jungle on the turn of a path 
to jump on me the moment the last words of 
that novel were written. The memory of an 
illness is very much like the memory of a night- 
mare. On emerging from it in a much en- 
feebled state I was inspired to direct my tot- 
tering steps towards the Indian Ocean, a com- 
plete change of surroundings and atmosphere 
from the Lake of Geneva, as nobody would 
deny. Begun so languidly and with such a 
fumbhng hand that the first twenty pages or 
more had to be thrown into the waste-paper 
basket, A Smile of Fortune, the most purely 
Indian Ocean story of the three, has ended by 
becoming what the reader will see. I will 
only say for myself that I have been patted 
on the back for it by most unexpected people, 
[117 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

personally unknown to me, the chief of them of 
course being the editor of a popular illustrated 
magazine who published it serially in one 
mighty instalment. Who will dare say after 
this that the change of air had not been an 
immense success? 

The origins of the middle story, The Secret 
Sharer, are quite other. It was written much 
earher and was published first in Harper s 
Magazine, during the early part, I think, of 
1911. Or perhaps the latter part? My mem- 
ory on that point is hazy. The basic fact 
of the tale I had in my possession for a good 
many years. It was in truth the common 
possession of the whole fleet of merchant 
ships trading to India, China, and Australia: 
a great company the last years of which 
coincided with my first years on the 
wider seas. The fact itself happened on 
board a very distinguished member of it, 
Cutty Sark by name and belonging to Mr. 
Willis, a notable ship-owner in his day, one 
of the kind (they are all underground now) 
who used personally to see his ships start on 
their voyages to those distant shores where 
they showed worthily the honoured house- 
flag of their owner. I am glad I was not 
[118 1 



TO '"TWIXT LAND AND SEA" 

too late to get at least one glimpse of Mr. 
Willis on a very wet and gloomy morning 
watching from the pier head of the New South 
Dock one of his cHppers starting on a China 
voyage — an imposing figure of a man under 
the invariable white hat so well known in the 
Port of London, waiting till the head of his 
ship had swung down-stream before giving 
her a dignified wave of a big gloved hand. 
For all I know it may have been the Cutty 
Sark herself though certainly not on that 
fatal voyage. I do not know the date of the 
occurrence on which the scheme of The Secret 
Sharer is founded; it came to fight and even 
got into newspapers about the middle eighties, 
though I had heard of it before, as it were 
privately, among the officers of the great 
wool fleet in which my first years in deep 
water were served. It came to fight under 
circumstances dramatic enough, I think, but 
which have nothing to do with my story. In 
the more specially maritime part of my 
writings this bit of presentation may take 
its place as one of my two Calm-pieces. For, 
if there is to be any classification by subjects, 
I have done two Storm-pieces in "The Nigger 
of the Narcissus'' and in "Typhoon"; and two 
[1191 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

Calm-pieces: this one and "The Shadow-Line," 
a book which belongs to a later period. 

Notwithstanding their autobiographical 
form the above two stories are not the record 
of personal experience. Their quality, such 
as it is, depends on something larger if less 
precise: on the character, vision and sentiment 
of the first twenty independent years of my 
life. And the same may be said of the Freya 
of the Seven Isles. I was considerably abused 
for writing that story on the ground of its 
cruelty, both in public prints and private 
letters. I remember one from a man in 
America who was quite furiously angry. 
He told me with curses and imprecations that 
I had no right to write such an abominable 
thing which, he said, had gratuitously and 
intolerably harrowed his feelings. It was a 
very interesting letter to read. Impressive 
too. I carried it for some days in my pocket. 
Had I the right .^^ The sincerity of the anger 
impressed me. Had I the right .^ Had I 
really sinned as he said or was it only that 
man's madness? Yet there was a method in 
his fury. ... I composed in my mind 
a violent reply, a reply of mild argument, a 
reply of lofty detachment; but they never got 
[120 1 



TO "CHANCE" 

on paper in the end and I have forgotten their 
phrasing. The very letter of the angry man 
has got lost somehow; and nothing remains 
now but the pages of the story which I cannot 
recall and would not recall if I could. 

But I am glad to think that the two women 
in this book: Alice, the sullen, passive victim 
of her fate, and the actively individual Freya, 
so determined to be the mistress of her own 
destiny, must have evoked some sympathies 
because of all my volumes of short stories this 
was the one for which there was the greatest 

immediate demand. 

J. C. 
1920. 



*' Chance" is one of my novels that shortly 
after having been begun were laid aside for a 
few months. Starting impetuously like a 
sanguine oarsman setting forth in the early 
morning I came very soon to a fork in the 
stream and found it necessary to pause and 
reflect seriously upon the direction I would 
take. Either presented to me equal fascina- 
tions, at least on the surface, and for that very 
reason my hesitation extended over many 
[1211 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

days. I floated in the calm water of pleasant 
speculation, between the diverging currents or 
conflicting impulses, with an agreeable but 
perfectly irrational conviction that neither of 
those currents would take me to destruction. 
My sympathies being equally divided and 
the two forces being equal it is perfectly 
obvious that nothing but mere chance in- 
fluenced my decision in the end. It is a mighty 
force that of mere chance; absolutely ir- 
resistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate 
forms such for instance as the charm, true 
or illusory, of a human being. It is very 
diflicult to put one's finger on the imponder- 
able, but I may venture to say that it is 
Flora de Barral who is really responsible for 
this novel which relates, in fact, the story 
of her fife. 

At the crucial moment of my indecision 
Flora de Barral passed before me, but* so 
swiftly that I failed at first to get hold of her. 
Though loth to give her up I didn't see the 
way of pursuit clearly and was on the point of 
becoming discouraged when my natural lik- 
ing for Captain Anthony came to my as- 
sistance. I said to myself that if that man was 
so determined to embrace a "wisp of mist" 
[122 1 



TO "CHANCE" 

the best thing for me was to join him in that 
eminently practical and praiseworthy ad- 
venture. I simply followed Captain Anthony. 
Each of us was bent on capturing his own 
dream. The reader will be able to judge of 
our success. 

Captain Anthony's determination led him a 
long and roundabout course and that is why 
this book is a long book. That the course 
was of my own choosing I will not deny. A 
critic had remarked that if I had selected an- 
other method of composition and taken a 
little more trouble the tale could have been 
told in about two hundred pages. I confess 
I do not perceive exactly the bearings of such 
criticism or even the use of such a remark. 
No doubt that by selecting a certain method 
and taking great pains the whole story might 
have been written out on a cigarette paper. 
For that matter, the whole history of mankind 
could be written thus if only approached with 
sufficient detachment. The history of men 
on this earth since the beginning of ages may 
be resumed in one phrase of infinite poig- 
nancy: They were born, they suffered, they 
died. . . Yet it is a great tale! But in 
the infinitely minute stories about men and 
[123 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am 
not capable of such detachment. 

What makes this book memorable to me 
apart from the natural sentiment one has for 
one's creation is the response it provoked. 
The general public responded largely, more 
largely perhaps than to any other book of 
mine, in the only way the general pubHc can 
respond, that is by buying a certain number 
of copies. This gave me a considerable 
amount of pleasure, because what I always 
feared most was drifting unconsciously into 
the position of a writer for a limited coterie; a 
position which would have been odious to me 
as throwing a doubt on the soundness of my 
belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple 
ideas and in sincere emotions. Regarded as a 
manifestation of criticism (for it would be 
outrageous to deny to the general public the 
possession of a critical mind) the reception 
was very satisfactory. I saw that I had 
managed to please a certain number of minds 
busy attending to their own very real affairs. 
It is agreeable to think one is able to please. 
From the minds whose business it is precisely 
to criticize such attempts to please, this 
book received an amount of discussion and of a 
f 124 1 



TO "CHANCE" 

rather searching analysis which not only 
satisfied that personal vanity I share with the 
rest of mankind but reached my deeper feel- 
ings and aroused my gratified interest. The 
undoubted sympathy informing the varied 
appreciations of that book was, I love to 
think, a recognition of my good faith in the 
pursuit of my art — the art of the novelist 
which a distinguished French writer at the 
end of a successful career complained of as 
being : Trop difficile ! It is indeed too ar- 
duous in the sense that the effort must be in- 
variably so much greater than the possible 
achievement. In that sort of foredoomed 
task which is in its nature very lonely also, 
sympathy is a precious thing. It can make 
the most severe criticism welcome. To be 
told that better things have been expected of 
one may be soothing in view of how much 
better things one had expected from oneself 
in this art which, in these days, is no longer 
justified by the assumption, somewhere and 
somehow, of a didactic purpose. 

I do not mean to hint that anybody had ever 

done me the injury (I don't mean insult, I 

mean injury) of charging a single one of my 

pages with didactic purpose. But every sub- 

[125] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

ject in the region of intellect and emotion must 
have a morahty of its own if it is treated 
at all sincerely ; and even the most artful of 
writers will give himself (and his morality) 
away in about every third sentence. The 
varied shades of moral significance which 
have been discovered in my writings are very 
numerous. None of them, however, have pro- 
voked a hostile manifestation. It may have 
happened to me to sin against taste now and 
then, but apparently I have never sinned 
against the basic feelings and elementary 
convictions which make life possible to the 
mass of mankind and, by establishing a stand- 
ard of judgment, set their idealism free to 
look for plainer ways, for higher feelings, for 
deeper purposes. 

I cannot say that any particular moral 
complexion has been put on this novel but I 
do not think that anybody had detected in it 
an evil intention. And it is only for their 
intentions that men can be held responsible. 
The ultimate effects of whatever they do are 
far beyond their control. In doing this 
book my intention was to interest people in 
my vision of things which is indissolubly 
alhed to the style in which it is expressed. 
[1261 



TO ''WITHIN THE TIDES'* 

In other words I wanted to write a certain 
amount of pages in prose, which, strictly 
speaking, is my proper business. I have 
attended to it conscientiously with the hope 
of being entertaining or at least not insuffer- 
ably boring to my readers. I can not suf- 
ficiently insist upon the truth that when I sit 
down to write my intentions are always 
blameless however deplorable the ultimate 
effect of the act may turn out to be. 

J. C. 
1920. 



The tales collected in this book have elicited 
on their appearance two utterances in the 
shape of comment and one distinctly critical 
charge. A reviewer observed that I liked to 
write of men who go to sea or live on lonely 
islands untrammeled by the pressure of 
worldly circumstances because such char- 
acters allowed freer play to my imagination 
which in their case was only bounded by 
natural laws and the universal human con- 
ventions. There is a certain truth in this 
remark no doubt. It is only the suggestion 
of dehberate choice that misses its mark. I 
[127 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

have not sought for special imaginative free- 
dom or a larger play of fancy in my choice 
of characters and subjects. The nature of the 
knowledge, suggestions or hints used in my 
imaginative work has depended directly on 
the conditions of my active life. It depended 
more on contacts, and very slight contacts 
at that, than on actual experience; because 
my life as a matter of fact was far from being 
adventurous in itself. Even now when I 
look back on it with a certain regret (who 
would not regret his youth?) and positive 
affection, its colouring wears the sober hue of 
hard work and exacting calls of duty, things 
which in themselves are not much charged 
with a feeling of romance. If these things 
appeal strongly to me even in retrospect 
it is, I suppose, because the romantic feeling 
of reality was in me an inborn faculty, that 
in itself may be a curse but when disciplined 
by a sense of personal responsibility and a 
recognition of the hard facts of existence 
shared with the rest of mankind becomes but a 
point of view from which the very shadows of 
life appear endowed with an internal glow. 
And such romanticism is not a sin. It is 
none the worse for the knowledge of truth. 
[128 1 



TO "WITHIN THE TIDES" 

It only tries to make the best of it, hard as it 
may be; and in this hardness discovers a cer- 
tain aspect of beauty. 

I am speaking here of romanticism in rela- 
tion to life, not of romanticism in relation to 
imaginative literature, which, in its early 
days, was associated simply with mediaeval 
subjects, or, at any rate, with subjects sought 
for in a remote past. My subjects are not 
mediaeval and I have a natural right to them 
because my past is very much my own. If 
their course lie out of the beaten path of 
organized social life, it is, perhaps, because 
I myself did in a sort break away from it early 
in obedience to an impulse which must have 
been very genuine since it has sustained me 
through all the dangers of disillusion. But 
that origin of my literary work was very far 
from giving a larger scope to my imagination. 
On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with 
matters outside the general run of everyday 
experience laid me under the obligation of a 
more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my 
own sensations. The problem was to make 
unfamihar things credible. To do that I 
had to create for them, to reproduce for them, 
to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of 

[129] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

actuality. This was the hardest task of all 
and the most important, in view of that 
conscientious rendering of truth in thought 
and fact which has been always my aim. 

The other utterance of the two I have 
alluded to above consisted in the observation 
that in this volume of mine the whole was 
greater than its parts. I pass it on to my 
readers merely remarking that if this is really 
so then I must take it as a tribute to my per- 
sonality since those stories which by implica- 
tion seem to hold so well together as to be 
surveyed en bloc and judged as the product 
of a single mood, were written at different 
times, under various influences and with 
the deliberate intention of trying several ways 
of telhng a tale. The hints and suggestions 
for all of them had been received at various 
times and in distant parts of the globe. The 
book received a good deal of varied criticism, 
mainly quite justifiable, but in a couple of 
instances quite surprising in its objections. 
Amongst them was the critical charge of false 
realism brought against the opening story: 
The Planter of Malata. I would have re- 
garded it as serious enough if I had not dis- 
covered on reading further that the distin- 
[130 1 



TO ''WITHIN THE TIDES" 

guished critic was accusing me simply of hav- 
ing sought to evade a happy ending out of 
a sort of moral cowardice, lest I should be 
condemned as a superficially sentimental 
person. Where (and of what sort) there are 
to be found in The Planter of Malata any 
germs of happiness that could have fructified 
at the end I am at a loss to see. Such crit- 
icism seems to miss the whole purpose and 
significance of a piece of writing the primary 
intention of which was mainly aesthetic; an 
essay in description and narrative around a 
given psychological situation. Of more ser- 
iousness was the spoken criticism of an old 
and valued friend who thought that in the 
scene near the rock, which from the point of 
view of psychology is crucial, neither Felicia 
Moorsom nor Geoffrey Renouard find the 
right things to say to each other. I didn't 
argue the point at the time, for, to be candid, 
I didn't feel quite satisfied with the scene 
myself. On re-reading it lately for the pur- 
pose of this edition I have come to the con- 
clusion that there is that much truth in my 
friend's criticism that I have made those 
people a little too exphcit in their emotion 
and thus have destroyed to a certain extent 

f 1311 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

the characteristic illusory glamour of their 
personalities. I regret this defect very much 
for I regard The Planter of Malata as a nearly 
successful attempt at doing a very difficult 
thing which I would have liked to have made 
as perfect as it lay in my power. Yet con- 
sidering the pitch and the tonality of the 
whole tale it is very difficult to imagine what 
else those two people could have found to say 
at that time and on that particular spot of the 
earth's surface. In the mood in which they 
both were, and given the exceptional state of 
their feelings, anything might have been said. 
The eminent critic who charged me with 
false realism, the outcome of timidity, was 
quite wrong. I should like to ask him what 
he imagines the, so to speak, lifelong embrace 
of Felicia Moorsom and Geoffrey Renouard 
could have been like? Could it have been at 
all.^ Would it have been credible.^ No! 
I did not shirk anything, either from timidity 
or laziness. Perhaps a little mistrust of my 
own powers would not have been altogether 
out of place in this connection. Rut it failed 
me; and I resemble Geoffrey Renouard in so 
far that when once engaged in an adventure 
I cannot bear the idea of turning back. The 
[132] 



TO ''WITHIN THE TIDES'' 
moment had arrived for these people to dis- 
close themselves. They had to do it. To 
render a crucial point of feelings in terms of 
human speech is really an impossible task. 
Written words can only form a sort of trans- 
lation. And if that translation happens, 
from want of skill or from over-anxiety, to be 
too literal, the people caught in the toils of 
passion, instead of disclosing themselves, 
which would be art, are made to give them- 
selves away, which is neither art nor life. 
Nor yet truth! At any rate not the whole 
truth ; for it is truth robbed of all its necessary 
and sympathetic reservations and qualifica- 
tions which give it its fair form, its just pro- 
portions, its semblance of human fellowship. 

Indeed the task of the translator of passions 
into speech may be pronounced "too difficult." 
However, with my customary impenitence I 
am glad I have attempted the story with all its 
implications and difficulties, including the 
scene by the side of the gray rock crowning 
the height of Malata. But I am not so in- 
ordinately pleased with the result as not to be 
able to forgive a patient reader who may find 
it somewhat disappointing. 

I have left myself no space to talk about the 
[133] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

other three stories because I do not think that 
they call for detailed comment. Each of 
them has its special mood and I have tried 
purposely to give each its special tone and a 
different construction of phrase. A reviewer 
asked in reference to the Inn of the Two 
Witches whether I ever came across a tale 
called A Very Strange Bed pubhshed in 
Household Words in 1852 or 54. I never saw 
a number of Household Words of that decade. 
A bed of the sort was discovered in an inn on 
the road between Rome and Naples at the 
end of the 18th century. Where I picked up 
the information I cannot say now but I am 
certain it was not in a tale. This bed is the 
only "fact" of the Witches' Inn. The other 
two stories have considerably more "fact" in 
them, derived from my own personal knowl- 
edge. 

1920. J. C. 



NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

The last word of this novel was written on 
the 29th of May, 1914. And that last word 
was the single word of the title. 

[134 1 



TO "VICTORY" 

Those were the times of peace. Now that 
the moment of pubhcation approaches I have 
been considering the discretion of altering the 
title page. The word Victory, the shining 
and tragic goal of noble effort, appeared too 
great, too august, to stand at the head of a 
mere novel. There was also the possibility 
of falling under the suspicion of commercial 
astuteness deceiving the public into the behef 
that the book had something to do with 
war. 

Of that, however, I was not afraid very 
much. What influenced my decision most 
were the obscure promptings of that pagan 
residuum of awe and wonder which lurks still 
at the bottom of our old humanity. Victory 
was the last word I had written in peace time. 
It was the last literary thought which had 
occurred to me before the doors of the Temple 
of Janus flying open with a crash shook the 
minds, the hearts, the consciences of men all 
over the world. Such coincidence could not 
be treated lightly. And I made up my mind 
to let the word stand, in the same hopeful 
spirit in which some simple citizen of Old 
Rome would have "accepted the Omen." 

The second point on which I wish to offer a 
[135] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

remark is the existence (in the novel) of a 
person named Schomberg. 

That I beheve him to be true goes without 
saying. I am not Hkely to offer pinchbeck 
wares to my pubhc consciously. Schomberg 
is an old member of my company. A very 
subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far back 
as the year 1899, he became notably active in a 
certain short story of mine pubhshed in 1902. 
Here he appears in a still larger part, true to 
life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, 
in this instance, his deeper passions come into 
play, and thus his grotesque psychology is 
completed at last. 

I don't pretend to say that this is the entire 
Teutonic psychology ; but it is indubitably the 
psychology of a Teuton. My object in men- 
tioning him here is to bring out the fact that, 
far from being the incarnation of recent 
animosities, he is the creature of my old, 
deep-seated and, as it were, impartial convic- 
tion. 

J. C. 



On approaching the task of writing this 
Note for "Victory" the first thing I am con- 
[136 1 



TO "VICTORY" 

scious of is the actual nearness of the book, its 
nearness to me personally, to the vanished 
mood in which it was written and to the 
mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices 
the book obtained when first published almost 
exactly a year after the beginning of the great 
war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 
long before the murder of an Austrian Arch- 
duke sounded the first note of warning for a 
world already full of doubts and fears. 

The contemporaneous very short Author's 
Note which is preserved in this edition bears 
sufficient witness to the feelings with which I 
consented to the publication of the book. 
The fact of the book having been pubhshed in 
the United States early in the year made it 
difficult to delay its appearance in England 
any longer. It came out in the thirteenth 
month of the war, and my conscience was 
troubled by the awful incongruity of throw- 
ing this bit of imagined drama into the welter 
of reality, tragic enough in all conscience but 
even more cruel than tragic and more inspir- 
ing than cruel. It seemed awfully presump- 
tuous to think there would be eyes to spare 
for those pages in a community which in the 
crash of the big guns and in the din of brave 
f 137 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

words expressing the truth of an indomitable 
faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp 
knife at its throat. 

The unchanging Man of history is wonder- 
fully adaptable both by his power of en- 
durance and in his capacity for detachment. 
The fact seems to be that the play of his 
destiny is too great for his fears and too 
mysterious for his understanding. Were the 
trump of the Last Judgment to sound sud- 
denly on a working day the musician at his 
piano would go on with his performance of 
Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall 
stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in 
the virtues of the leather. And with perfect 
propriety. For what are we to let ourselves 
be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too 
mighty for our ears and too awful for our 
terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck 
suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The 
reader will go on reading if the book pleases 
him and the critic will go on criticizing with 
that faculty of detachment born perhaps from 
a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet 
the only faculty that seems to assimilate 
man to the immortal gods. 

It is only when the catastrophe matches 
[138 1 



TO "VICTORY" 

the natural obscurity of our fate that even the 
best representative of the race is Hable to lose 
his detachment. It is very obvious that on 
the arrival of the gentlemanly Mr. Jones, the 
single-minded Ricardo and the faithful Pedro, 
Heyst, the man of universal detachment, 
loses his mental self-possession, that fine 
attitude before the universally irremediable 
which wears the name of stoicism. It is 
all a matter of proportion. There should 
have been a remedy for that sort of thing. 
And yet there is no remedy. Behind this 
minute instance of hfe's hazards Heyst sees 
the power of bhnd destiny. Besides, Heyst 
in his fine detachment had lost the habit of 
asserting himself. I don't mean the courage 
of self-assertion, either moral or physical, 
but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, 
the readiness of mind and the turn of the 
hand that come without reflection and lead 
the man to excellence in Hfe, in art, in crime, 
in virtue and for the matter of that, even in 
love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfec- 
tion. The habit of profound reflection, I am 
compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all 
the habits formed by the civihzed man. 
But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely 
[139] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

of making fun of Axel Heyst. I have always 
liked him. The flesh and blood individual 
who stands behind the infinitely more familiar 
figure of the book I remember as a mysterious 
Swede right enough. Whether he was a 
baron, too, I am not so certain. He himself 
never laid a claim to that distinction. His 
detachment was too great to make any claims 
big or small on one's creduhty. I will not 
say where I met him because I fear to give my 
readers a wrong impression, since a marked 
incongruity between a man and his surround- 
ings is often a very misleading circumstance. 
We became very friendly for a time and I 
would not hke to expose him to unpleasant 
suspicions though, personally, I am sure he 
would have been indifferent to suspicions as 
he was indifferent to all the other disadvan- 
tages of fife. He was not the whole Heyst of 
course; he is only the physical and moral 
foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of 
a short acquaintance. That it was short is 
certainly not my fault for he had charmed 
me by the mere amenity of his detachment 
which, in this case, I cannot help thinking 
he had carried to excess. He went away 
from his rooms without leaving a trace. I 
f 140 1 



TO ^'VICTORY" 

wondered where he had gone to — ^but now I 
know. He vanished from my ken only to 
drift into this adventure that, unavoidable, 
waited for him in a world which he persisted 
in looking upon as a malevolent shadow spin- 
ning in the sunlight. Often in the course 
of years an expressed sentiment, the particu- 
lar sense of a phrase heard casually, would re- 
call him to my mind so that I have fastened 
on to him many words heard on other men's 
lips and belonging to other men's less perfect, 
less pathetic moods. 

The same observation will apply mutatis 
mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is built on a much 
slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or what- 
ever his name was) did not drift away from me. 
He turned his back on me and walked out of 
the room. It was in a little hotel in the 
Island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in 
the year '75) where we found him one hot 
afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone 
in the loud buzzing of flies to which his im- 
mobility and his cadaverous aspect gave an 
almost gruesome significance. Our invasion 
must have displeased him because he got off 
the chairs brusquely and walked out leaving 
with me an indelibly weird impression of his 
[141] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

thin shanks. One of the men with me said 
that the fellow was the most desperate gam- 
bler he had ever come across. I said: "A 
professional sharper?" and got for answer: 
"He's a terror; but I must say that up to a 
certain point he will play fair. . . ." I 
wonder what the point was. I never saw 
him again because I believe he went straight 
on board a mail-boat which left within the 
hour for other ports of call in the direction of 
Aspinall. Mr. Jones' characteristic insolence 
belongs to another man of a quite dififerent 
type. I will say nothing as to the origins of 
his mentality because I don't intend to make 
any damaging admissions. 

It so happened that the very same year 
Ricardo — the physical Ricardo — was a fellow 
passenger of mine on board an extremely 
small and extremely dirty little schooner, 
during a four days' passage between two 
places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names 
don't matter. For the most part he lay on 
deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising 
himself from time to time on his elbow would 
talk about himself and go on talking, not 
exactly to me or even at me (he would not even 
look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) 
[142] 



TO "VICTORY" 

but more as if communing in a low voice with 
his famihar devil. Now and then he would 
give me a glance and make the hairs of his 
stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes 
were green and every cat I see to this day 
reminds me of the exact contour of his face. 
What he was travelling for or what was his 
business in life he never confided to me. 
Truth to say the only passenger on board that 
schooner who could have talked openly about 
his activities and purposes was a very snuffy 
and conversationally delightful friar, the Su- 
perior of a convent, attended by a very young 
lay brother, of a particularly ferocious coun- 
tenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate 
in the dark and unspeakable cuddy of that 
schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner 
of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, 
very ill indeed. Ricardo seemed to be either 
a servant or the confidant of that aged and 
distinguished-looking invalid, who early on 
the passage held a long murmured conversa- 
tion with the friar, and after that did nothing 
but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes and now 
and then call for Martin in a voice full of 
pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in 
the book would go below into that beastly and 

[ 143 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

noisome hole, remain there mysteriously, and 
coming up on deck again with a face on which 
nothing could be read, would as hkely as not 
resume for my edification the exposition of 
his moral attitude toward life illustrated by 
striking particular instances of the most 
atrocious complexion. Did he mean to 
frighten me? Or seduce me? Or astonish 
me? Or arouse my admiration? All he did 
was to arouse my amused incredulity. As 
scoundrels go he was far from being a bore. 
For the rest my innocence was so great then 
that I could not take his philosophy seriously. 
All the time he kept one ear turned to the 
cuddy in the manner of a devoted servant, but 
I had the idea that in some way or other he 
had imposed the connection on the invahd for 
some end of his own. The reader therefore 
won't be surprised to hear that one morning 
I was told without any particular emotion 
by the padrone of the schooner that the 
"Rich man" down there was dead: He had 
died in the night. I don't remember ever 
being so moved by the desolate end of a com- 
plete stranger. I looked down the skylight, 
and there was the devoted Martin busy cord- 
ing cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased 
[ 1441 



TO "VICTORY" 

whose white beard and hooked nose were the 
only parts I could make out in the dark depths 
of a horrible stuffy bunk. 

As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon 
and continued calm during all that night and 
the terrible, flaming day, the late Rich man 
had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though 
as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low 
pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our des- 
tination. The excellent Father Superior men- 
tioned to me with an air of immense 
commiseration: "The poor man has left a 
young daughter." Who was to look after her 
I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin 
taking the trunks ashore with great care just 
before I landed myself. I would perhaps 
have tracked the ways of that man of im- 
mense sincerity for a little while but I had 
some of my own very pressing business to 
attend to, which in the end got mixed up with 
an earthquake and so I had no time to give 
to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that 
I have not forgotten him, though. 

My contact with the faithful Pedro was 

much shorter and my observation of him was 

less complete but incomparably more anxious. 

It ended in a sudden inspiration to get out 

[145 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks and 
mats by the side of a path. As I went in there 
only to ask for a bottle of lemonade I have not 
to this day the slightest idea what in my ap- 
pearance or actions could have roused his 
terrible ire. It became manifest to me less 
than two minutes after I had set eyes on him 
for the first time, and though immensely sur- 
prised of course I didn't stop to think it out. 
I took the nearest short cut — through the 
wall. This bestial apparition and a certain 
enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti 
only a couple of months afterwards have 
fixed my conception of blind, furious, un- 
reasoning rage, as manifested in the human 
animal, to the end of my days. Of the nigger 
I used to dream for years afterwards. Of 
Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. 
I got away from him too quickly. 

It seems to me but natural that those three 
buried in a corner of my memory should 
suddenly get out into the light of the world — 
so natural that I offer no excuse for their ex- 
istence. They were there, they had to come 
out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer 
of tales who had taken to his trade without 
preparation or premeditation and without any 
ri46 1 



TO "VICTORY" 

moral intention but that which pervades the 
whole scheme of this world of senses. 

Since this Note is mostly concerned with 
personal contacts and the origins of the per- 
sons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of 
Lena, because if I were to leave her out it 
would look like a slight; and nothing would 
be further from my thoughts than putting a 
slight on Lena. If of all the personages in- 
volved in the "mystery of Samburan" I 
have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I 
call Heyst) it was at her, whom I call Lena, 
that I have looked the longest and with a 
most sustained attention. This attention 
originated in idleness for which I have a natural 
talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, 
in a town not of the tropics but of the South of 
France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, 
the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes and 
the sounds of strident music. The orchestra 
was rather smaller than the one that per- 
formed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air 
more of a family party than of an enlisted 
band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more 
respectable than the Zangiacomo musical 
enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more 
homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch 
[147 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

that in the intervals when all the performers 
left the platform one of them went amongst 
the marble tables collecting offerings of sous 
and francs in a battered tin receptacle recall- 
ing the shape of a sauceboat. It was a girl. 
Her detachment from her task seems to me 
now to have equalled or even surpassed 
Heyst's aloofness from all the mental deg- 
radations to which a man's intelligence is 
exposed in its way through life. Silent and 
wide-eyed she went from table to table with 
the air of a sleep-walker and with no other 
sound but the slight rattle of the coins to at- 
tract attention. It was long after the sea- 
chapter of my life had been closed but it is 
difficult to discard completely the character- 
istics of half a life-time, and it was in some- 
thing of the jack-ashore spirit that I dropped 
a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; where- 
upon the sleep-walker turned her head to gaze 
at me and said "Merci, Monsieur," in a tone 
in which there was no gratitude but only sur- 
prise. I must have been idle indeed to take the 
trouble to remark on such slight evidence that 
the voice was very charming and when the 
performers resumed their seats I shifted my 
position slightly in order not to have that 
[148] 



TO "VICTORY'' 

particular performer hidden from me by the 
Httle man with the beard who conducted, and 
who might for all I know have been her 
father, but whose real mission in life was to be 
a model for the Zangiacomo of "Victory." 
Having got a clear line of sight I naturally 
(being idle) continued to look at the girl 
through all the second part of the programme. 
The shape of her dark head inchned over the 
violin was fascinating, and, while resting be- 
tween the pieces of that interminable pro- 
granmie she was, in her white dress and with 
her brown hands reposing in her lap, the 
very image of dreamy innocence. The ma- 
ture, bad-tempered woman at the piano might 
have been her mother, though there was not 
the slightest resemblance between them. All 
I am certain of in their personal relation to 
each other is that cruel pinch on the upper 
part of the arm. That I am sure I have seen! 
There could be no mistake. I was in a too 
idle mood to imagine such a gratuitous bar- 
barity. It may have been playfulness, yet 
the girl jumped up as if she had been stung 
by a wasp. It may have been playfulness. 
Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence" 
rub gently the affected place as she filed off 
[149] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

with the other performers down the middle 
aisle between the marble tables in the uproar 
of voices, the rattling of dominoes, through 
a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I be- 
lieve that those people left the town next 
day. 

Or perhaps they had only migrated to the 
other big cafe, on the other side of the Place 
de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not 
go across to find out. It was my perfect 
idleness that had invested the girl with a 
peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy 
it by any superfluous exertion. The recep- 
tivity of my indolence made the impression so 
permanent that when the moment came for 
her meeting with Heyst I felt that she would 
be heroically equal to every demand of the 
risky and uncertain future. I was so con- 
vinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I 
won't say without a pang but certainly with- 
out misgivings. And in view of her trium- 
phant end what more could I have done for her 
rehabihtation and her happiness.^ 

1920. J. C. 



150] 



TO "THE SHADOW-LINE" 

This story, which I admit to be in its 
brevity a fairly complex piece of work, was 
not intended to touch on the supernatural. 
Yet more than one critic has been inchned 
to take it in that way, seeing in it an attempt 
on my part to give the fullest scope to my 
imagination by taking it beyond the confines 
of the world of the living, suffering humanity. 
But as a matter of fact my imagination is 
not made of stuff so elastic as all that. I 
believe that if I attempted to put the strain 
of the Supernatural on it it would fail de- 
plorably and exhibit an unlovely gap. But 
I could never have attempted such a thing, 
because all my moral and intellectual being is 
penetrated by an invincible conviction that 
whatever falls under the dominion of our 
senses must be in nature and, however ex- 
ceptional, cannot differ in its essence from 
all the other effects of the visible and tangible 
world of which we are a self-conscious part. 
The world of the hving contains enough 
marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and 
mysteries acting upon our emotions and in- 
telligence in ways so inexplicable that it would 
almost justify the conception of life as an 
[ 151 ] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my 
consciousness of the marvellous to be ever 
fascinated by the mere supernatural, which 
(take it any way you like) is but a manu- 
factured article, the fabrication of minds 
insensitive to the intimate dehcacies of our re- 
lation to the dead and to the Hving, in their 
countless multitudes; a desecration of our 
tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. 
Whatever my native modesty may be it 
will never condescend so low as to seek help 
for my imagination within those vain imagin- 
ings common to all ages and that in them- 
selves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind 
with unutterable sadness. As to the effect 
of a mental or moral shock on a common mind 
that is quite a legitimate subject for study and 
description. Mr. Burns ' moral being receives 
a severe shock in his relations with his late 
captain, and this in his diseased state turns 
into a mere superstitious fancy compounded 
of fear and animosity. This fact is one of the 
elements of the story, but there is nothing 
supernatural in it, nothing so to speak from 
beyond the confines of this world, which in all 
conscience holds enough mystery and terror in 
itself. 

[152] 



TO "THE SHADOW-LINE" 

Perhaps if I had pubhshed this tale, which 
I have had for a long time in my mind, under 
the title of First Command, no suggestion of 
the Supernatural would have been found in it 
by any impartial reader, critical or otherwise. 
I will not consider here the origins of the 
feehng in which its actual title, The Shadow- 
Line, occurred to my mind. Primarily the 
aim of this piece of writing was the presenta- 
tion of certain facts which certainly were 
associated with the change from youth, care- 
free and fervent, to the more self-conscious 
and more poignant period of maturer Hfe. 
Nobody can doubt that before the supreme 
trial of a whole generation I had an acute 
consciousness of the minute and insignificant 
character of my own obscure experience. 
There could be no question here of any paral- 
lehsm. That notion never entered my head. 
But there was a feeling of identity, though 
with an enormous diflFerence of scale — as of 
one single drop measured against the bitter 
and stormy immensity of an ocean. And 
this was very natural too. For when we be- 
gin to meditate on the meaning of our own 
past it seems to fill all the world in its pro- 
fundity and its magnitude. This book was 
[153 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

written in the last three months of the year 
1916. Of all the subjects of which a writer 
of tales is more or less conscious within him- 
self this is the only one I found it possible to 
attempt at the time. The depth and the 
nature of the mood with which I approached 
it is best expressed perhaps in the dedication 
which strikes me now as a most dispropor- 
tionate thing — as another instance of the over- 
whelming greatness of our own emotion to 
ourselves. 

This much having been said I may pass on 
now to a few remarks about the mere material 
of the story. As to locality it belongs to that 
part of the Eastern Seas from which I have 
carried away into my writing life the greatest 
number of suggestions. From my statement 
that I thought of this story for a long time 
under the title of First Command the reader 
may guess that it is concerned with my per- 
sonal experience. And as a matter of fact it 
is personal experience seen in perspective 
with the eye of the mind and coloured by that 
affection one can't help feeling for such events 
of one's life as one has no reason to be ashamed 
of. And that affection is as intense (I ap- 
peal here to universal experience) as the 
[154 1 



TO ''THE SHADOW-LINE" 
shame, and almost the anguish with which 
one remembers some unfortunate occurrences, 
down to mere mistakes in speech, that have 
been perpetrated by one in the past. The 
effect of perspective in memory is to make 
things loom large because the essentials stand 
out isolated from their surroundings of in- 
significant daily facts which have naturally 
faded out of one's mind. I remember that 
period of my sea-hfe with pleasure because 
begun inauspiciously it turned out in the end 
a success from a personal point of view, leav- 
ing a tangible proof in the terms of the letter 
the owners of the ship wrote to me two years 
afterwards when I resigned my command in 
order to come home. This resignation marked 
the beginning of another phase of my seaman's 
life, its terminal phase, if I may say so, which 
in its own way has coloured another portion 
of my writings. I didn't know then how near 
its end my sea-life was, and therefore I felt 
no sorrow except at parting with the ship. 
I was sorry also to break my connection with 
the firm which owned her and who were 
pleased to receive with friendly kindness and 
give their confidence to a man who had en- 
tered their service in an accidental manner 
[155] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

and in very adverse circumstances. Without 
disparaging the earnestness of my purpose I 
suspect now that luck had no small part in 
the success of the trust reposed in me. And 
one cannot help remembering with pleasure 
the time when one's best efforts were seconded 
by a run of luck. 

The words ''Worthy of my undying regard'' 
selected by me for the motto on the title page 
are quoted from the text of the book itself; 
and, though one of my critics surmised that 
they applied to the ship, it is evident from the 
place where they stand that they refer to 
the men of that ship's company: complete 
strangers to their new captain and yet who 
stood by him so well during those twenty days 
that seemed to have been passed on the brink 
of a slow and agonizing destruction. And 
that is the greatest memory of all! For 
surely it is a great thing to have commanded a 
handful of men worthy of one's undying re- 
gard. 

J, C. 

1920. 



156 



TO "THE ARROW OF GOLD" 

FIRST NOTE 

The pages which follow have been extracted 
from a pile of manuscript which was appar- 
ently meant for the eye of one woman only. 
She seems to have been the writer's childhood 
friend. They had parted as children, or very 
little more than children. Years passed. 
Then something recalled to the woman the 
companion of her young days and she wrote 
to him: "I have been hearing of you lately. 
r know where life has brought you. You 
certainly selected your own road. But to us, 
left behind, it always looked as if you had 
struck out into a pathless desert. We always 
regarded you as a person that must be given 
up for lost. But you have turned up again; 
and though we may never see each other, my 
memory welcomes you and I confess to you I 
should hke to know the incidents on the road 
which has led you to where you are now." 

And he answers her: "I believe you are the 
only one now alive who remembers me as a 
child. I have heard of you from time to time, 
but I wonder what sort of person you are now. 
Perhaps if I did know I wouldn't dare put pen 
to paper. But I don't know. I only re- 
f 157 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

member that we were great chums. In fact, 
I chmnmed with you even more than with your 
brothers. But I am hke the pigeon that went 
away in the fable of the Two Pigeons. If I 
once start to tell you I would want you to feel 
that you have been there yourself. I may 
overtax your patience with the story of my 
hfe so different from yours, not only in all the 
facts but altogether in spirit. You may not 
understand. You may even be shocked. I 
say all this to myself; but I know I shall 
succumb! I have a distinct recollection that 
in the old days, when you were about fifteen, 
you always could make me do whatever you 
liked." 

He succumbed. He begins his story for her 
with the minute narration of this adventure 
which took about twelve months to develop. 
In the form in which it is presented here it has 
been pruned of all allusions to their common 
past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explana- 
tions addressed directly to the friend of his 
childhood. And even as it is the whole thing 
is of considerable length. It seems that he 
had not only a memory but that he also knew 
how to remember. But as to that opinions 
may differ. 

[158 1 



TO **THE ARROW OF GOLD" 

This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, 
begins in Marseilles. It ends there, too. 
Yet it might have happened anywhere. This 
does not mean that the people concerned could 
have come together in pure space. The 
locahty had a definite importance. As to the 
time, it is easily fixed by the events at about 
the middle years of the seventies, when Don 
Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general 
reaction of all Europe against the excesses of 
communistic Republicanism, made his at- 
tempt for the throne of Spain, arms in hand, 
amongst the hills and gorges of Guipuzcoa. 
It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender's 
adventure for a Crown that History will have 
to record with the usual grave moral disap- 
proval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the 
departing romance. Historians are very much 
like other people. 

However, History has nothing to do with 
this tale. Neither is the moral justification 
or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. 
If anything it is perhaps a little sympathy that 
the writer expects for his buried youth, as he 
lives it over again at the end of his insignificant 
course on this earth. Strange person — yet 
perhaps not so very different from ourselves. 
[159] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

A few words as to certain facts may be 
added. 

It may seem that he was plunged very 
abruptly into this long adventure. But from 
certain passages (suppressed here because 
mixed up with irrelevant matter) it appears 
clearly that at the time of the meeting in the 
cafe, Mills had already gathered, in various 
quarters, a definite view of the eager youth 
who had been introduced to him in that ultra- 
legitimist salon. What Mills had learned 
represented him as a young gentleman who 
had arrived furnished with proper credentials 
and who apparently was doing his best to waste 
his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohem- 
ian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it 
later) on one side, and on the other making 
friends with the people of the Old Town, 
pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. 
He pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman 
himself and was already credited with an ill- 
defined and vaguely illegal enterprise in the 
Gulf of Mexico. At once it occurred to Mills 
that this eccentric youngster was the very 
person for what the legitimist sympathizers 
had very much at heart just then; to organize 
a supply by sea of arms and ammunition to 
[1601 



TO ''THE ARROW OF GOLD" 

the Carlist detachments in the South. It was 
precisely to confer on that matter with Doiia 
Rita that Captain Blunt had been despatched 
from Headquarters. 

Mills got in touch with Blunt at once and 
put the suggestion before him. The Captain 
thought this the very thing. As a matter of 
fact, on that evening of Carnival, those two, 
Mills and Blunt, had been actually looking 
everywhere for our man. They had decided 
that he should be drawn into the affair if it 
could be done. Blunt naturally wanted to see 
him first. He must have estimated him a 
promising person, but, from another point of 
view, not dangerous. Thus lightly was the 
notorious (and at the same time mysterious) 
Monsieur George brought into the world; 
out of the contact of two minds which did not 
give a single thought to his flesh and blood. 

This purpose explains the intimate tone 
given to their first conversation and the sudden 
introduction of Dona Rita's history. Mills, 
of course, wanted to hear all about it. As to 
Captain Blunt I suspect that, at the time, he 
was thinking of nothing else. In addition 
it was Dona Rita who would have to do the per- 
suading ; for, after all, such an enterprise with 
[1611 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

its ugly and desperate risks was not a trifle to 
put before a man — however young. 

It cannot be denied that Mills seems to have 
acted somewhat unscrupulously. He himself 
appears to have had some doubt about it, at a 
given moment, as they were driving to the 
Prado. But perhaps Mills, with his penetra- 
tion, understood very well the nature he was 
dealing with. He might even have envied it. 
But it's not my business to excuse Mills. 
As to him whom we may regard as Mills' 
victim it is obvious that he has never har- 
boured a single reproachful thought. For 
him Mills is not to be criticized. A remark- 
able instance of the great power of mere in- 
dividuality over the young. 



Having named all the short prefaces written 
for my books, Author's Notes, this one too 
must have the same heading for the sake of 
uniformity if at the risk of some confusion. 
"The Arrow of Gold," as its sub-title states, 
is a story between two Notes. But these 
Notes are embodied in its very frame, belong 
to its texture, and their mission is to prepare 
[162 1 



TO "THE ARROW OF GOLD" 

and close the story. They are material to the 
comprehension of the experience related in the 
narrative and are meant to determine the 
time and place together with certain historical 
circumstances conditioning the existence of 
the people concerned in the transactions of the 
twelve months covered by the narrative. It 
was the shortest way of getting over the 
preliminaries of a piece of work which could 
not have been of the nature of a chronicle. 

"The Arrow of Gold" is my first after-the- 
war publication. The writing of it was be- 
gun in the autumn of 1917 and finished in the 
summer of 1918. Its memory is associated 
with that of the darkest hour of the war, 
which, in accordance with the well known 
proverb, preceded the dawn — the dawn of 
peace. 

As I look at them now, these pages, written 
in the days of stress and dread, wear a look of 
strange serenity. They were written calmly, 
yet not in cold blood, and are perhaps the 
only kind of pages I could have written at that 
time full of menace, but also full of faith. 

The subject of this book I have been carry- 
ing about with me for many years, not so 
much a possession of my memory as an in- 
[163 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

herent part of myself. It was ever present 
to my mind and ready to my hand, but I was 
loth to touch it from a feehng of what I 
imagined to be mere shyness but which in 
reality was a very comprehensible mistrust of 
myself. 

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs 
the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it 
has got to be carried into the market-place. 
This being the product of my private garden 
my reluctance can be easily understood; 
though some critics have expressed their regret 
that I had not written this book fifteen years 
earlier I do not share that opinion. If I took 
it up so late in life it is because the right 
moment had not arrived till then. I mean the 
positive feeling of it, which is a thing that 
cannot be discussed. Neither will I discuss 
here the regrets of those critics, which seem to 
me the most irrelevant thing that could have 
been said in connection with literary criticism. 

I never tried to conceal the origins of the 
subject matter of this book which I have 
hesitated so long to write; but some reviewers 
indulged themselves with a sense of triumph 
in discovering in it my Dominic of "The 
Mirror of the Sea" under his own name (a 
f 164] 



TO "THE ARROW OF GOLD" 
truly wonderful discovery) and in recognizing 
the balancelle Tremolino in the unnamed little 
craft in which Mr. George pHed his fantastic 
trade and sought to allay the pain of his in- 
curable wound. I am not in the least dis- 
concerted by this display of perspicacity. It 
is the same man and the same balancelle. 
But for the purposes of a book like "The 
Mirror of the Sea" all I could make use of was 
the personal history of the little Tremolino. 
The present work is not in any sense an at- 
tempt to develop a subject lightly touched 
upon in former years and in connection with 
quite another kind of love. What the story 
of the Tremolino in its anecdotic character has 
in common with the story of "The Arrow of 
Gold" is the quality of initiation (through an 
ordeal which required some resolution to face) 
into the life of passion. In the few pages at 
the end of "The Mirror of the Sea" and in 
the whole volume of "The Arrow of Gold," 
that and no other is the subject offered to the 
pubHc. The pages and the book form to- 
gether a complete record; and the only as- 
surance I can give my readers is, that as it 
stands here with all its imperfections it is 
given to them complete. 
[ 165 ] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

I venture this explicit statement because, 
amidst much sympathetic appreciation, I have 
detected here and there a note, as it were, of 
suspicion. Suspicion of facts concealed, of 
explanations held back, of inadequate motives. 
But what is lacking in the facts is simply 
what I did not know, and what is not ex- 
plained is what I did not understand myself, 
and what seems inadequate is the fault of my 
imperfect insight. And all that I could not 
help. In the case of this book I was unable 
to supplement these deficiences by the exercise 
of my inventive faculty. It was never very 
strong; and on this occasion its use would 
have seemed exceptionally dishonest. It is 
from that ethical motive and not from tim- 
idity that I elected to keep strictly within the 
limits of unadorned sincerity and to try to 
enlist the sympathies of my readers without 
assuming lofty omniscience or descending to 
the subterfuge of exaggerated emotions. 

1920. J. C. 



Of the three long novels of mine which 
suffered an interruption, "The Rescue" was 
the one that had to wait the longest for the 
[166 1 



TO "THE RESCUE" 
good pleasure of the Fates. I am betraying 
no secret when I state here that it had to wait 
precisely for twenty years. I laid it aside at 
the end of the summer of 1898 and it was 
about the end of the summer of 1918 that I 
took it up again with the firm determination 
to see the end of it and helped by the sudden 
feeling that I might be equal to the task. 

This does not mean that I turned to it with 
elation. I was well aware and perhaps even 
too much aware of the dangers of such an ad- 
venture. The amazingly sympathetic kind- 
ness which men of various temperaments, 
diverse views and different literary tastes have 
been for years displaying towards my work 
has done much for me, has done all — except 
giving me that overweening self-confidence 
which may assist an adventurer sometimes 
but in the long run ends by leading him to the 
gallows. 

As the characteristic I want most to impress 
upon these short Author's Notes prepared for 
my first Collected Edition is that of absolute 
frankness, I hasten to declare that I founded 
my hopes not on my supposed merits but 
on the continued goodwill of my readers. I 
may say at once that my hopes have been 
[167 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

justified out of all proportion to my deserts. 
I met with the most considerate, most deli- 
cately expressed criticism free from all antago- 
nism and in its conclusions showing an in- 
sight which in itself could not fail to move me 
deeply, but was associated also with enough 
commendation to make me feel rich beyond 
the dreams of avarice — I mean an artist's 
avarice which seeks its treasure in the hearts 
of men and women. 

No! Whatever the preliminary anxieties 
might have been this adventure was not to 
end in sorrow. Once more Fortune favoured 
audacity; and yet I have never forgotten the 
jocular translation of Audaces fortuna juvat 
offered to me by my tutor when I was a small 
boy: "The Audacious get bitten." How- 
ever he took care to mention that there were 
various kinds of audacity. Oh, there are, 
there are! . . . There is, for instance, 
the kind of audacity almost indistinguishable 
from impudence. ... I must believe 
that in this case I have not been impudent 
for I am not conscious of having been 
bitten. 

The truth is that when "The Rescue" was 
laid aside it was not laid aside in despair. 
[1681 



TO "THE RESCUE" 

Several reasons contributed to this abandon- 
ment and, no doubt, the first of them was the 
growing sense of general difficulty in the 
handhng of the subject. The contents and 
the course of the story I had clearly in my 
mind. But as to the way of presenting the 
facts, and perhaps in a certain measure as to 
the nature of the facts themselves, I had 
many doubts. I mean the telling, representa- 
tive facts, helpful to carry on the idea, and, 
at the same time, of such a nature as not to 
demand an elaborate creation of the atmos- 
phere to the detriment of the action. I did 
not see how I could avoid becoming wearisome 
in the presentation of detail and in the pursuit 
of clearness. I saw the action plainly enough. 
What I had lost for the moment was the sense 
of the proper formula of expression, of the 
only formula that would suit. This, of course, 
weakened my confidence in the intrinsic 
worth and in the possible interest of the story 
— ^that is in my invention. But I suspect that 
all the trouble was, in reality, the doubt of 
my prose, the doubt of its adequacy, of its 
power to master both the colours and the 
shades. 

It is difficult to describe, exactly as I re- 
1691 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

member it, the complex state of my feelings; 
but those of my readers who take an interest 
in artistic perplexities will understand me 
best when I point out that I dropped "The 
Rescue" not to give myself up to idleness, re- 
grets, or dreaming, but to begin "The Nigger 
of the Narcissus" and to go on with it without 
hesitation and without a pause. A com- 
parison of any page of "The Rescue" with 
any page of "The Nigger" will furnish an 
ocular demonstration of the nature and the 
inward meaning of this first crisis of my writ- 
ing life. For it was a crisis undoubtedly. 
The laying aside of a work so far advanced 
was a very awful decision to take. It was 
wrung from me by a sudden conviction that 
there only was the road of salvation, the 
clear way out for an uneasy conscience. The 
finishing of "The Nigger" brought to my 
troubled mind the comforting sense of an 
accompUshed task, and the first conscious- 
ness of a certain sort of mastery which could 
accomphsh something with the aid of pro- 
pitious stars. Why I did not return to 
"The Rescue" at once then, was not for the 
reason that I had grown afraid of it. Reing 
able now to assume a firm attitude I said to 
[170 1 



TO "THE RESCUE" 

myself deliberately: "That thing can wait." 
At the same time I was just as certain in my 
mind that "Youth," a story which I had then, 
so to speak, on the tip of my pen, could not 
wait. Neither could Heart of Darkness 
be put off; for the practical reason that Mr. 
Wm. Blackwood having requested me to write 
something for the No. M. of his magazine I 
had to stir up at once the subject of that tale 
which had been long lying quiescent in my 
mind, because, obviously, the venerable Maga 
at her patriarchal age of 1000 numbers could 
not be kept waiting. Then "Lord Jim," 
with about seventeen pages already written 
at odd times, put in his claim which was ir- 
resistible. Thus every stroke of the pen was 
taking me further away from the abandoned 
"Rescue," not without some compunction on 
my part but with a gradually diminishing re- 
sistance ; till at last I let myself go as if recog- 
nizing a superior influence against which 
it was useless to contend. 

The years passed and the pages grew in 
number, and the long reveries of which they 
were the outcome stretched wide between me 
and the deserted "Rescue" hke the smooth 
hazy spaces of a dreamy sea. Yet I never 
[1711 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

actually lost sight of that dark speck in the 
misty distance. It had grown very small but 
it asserted itself with the appeal of old as- 
sociations. It seemed to me that it would be 
a base thing for me to slip out of the world 
leaving it out there all alone, waiting for its 
fate — that would never come! 

Sentiment, pure sentiment as you see, 
prompted me in the last instance to face the 
pains and hazards of that return. As I moved 
slowly towards the abandoned body of the tale 
it loomed up big amongst the ghttering shal- 
lows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. 
There was nothing about it of a grim derelict. 
It had an air of expectant life. One after 
another I made out the famihar faces watching 
my approach with faint smiles of amused 
recognition. They had known well enough 
that I was bound to come back to them. But 
their eyes met mine seriously as was only to be 
expected since I myself felt very serious as I 
stood amongst them again after years of ab- 
sence. At once, without wasting words, we 
went to work together on our renewed hfe; 
and every moment I felt more strongly that 
They Who had Waited bore no grudge to the 
man who however widely he may have wan- 
[172 1 



''NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS" 

dered at times had played truant only once in 
his life. 

1920. J. C. 



I don't know whether I ought to offer an 
apology for this collection which has more to 
do with Hfe than with letters. Its appeal is 
made to orderly minds. This, to be frank 
about it, is a process of tidying up, which, 
from the nature of things, can not be regarded 
as premature. The fact is that I wanted to do 
it myself because of a feehng that had nothing 
to do with the considerations of worthiness or 
unworthiness of the small (but unbroken) 
pieces collected within the covers of this 
volume. Of course it may be said that I 
might have taken up a broom and used it 
without saying anything about it. That 
certainly is one way of tidying up. 

But it would have been too much to have 
expected me to treat all this matter as remov- 
able rubbish. All those things had a place 
in my life. Whether any of them deserve 
to have been picked up and ranged on the 
shelf — ^this shelf — I cannot say, and, frankly, 
[173] 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

I have not allowed my mind to dwell on the 
question. I was afraid of thinking myself 
into a mood that would hurt my feehngs; for 
those pieces of writing, whatever may be the 
comment on their display, appertain to the 
character of the man. 

And so here they are, dusted, which was but 
a decent thing to do, but in no way poHshed, 
extending from the year '98 to the year '20, 
a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of 
really innocent attitudes: Conrad literary, 
Conrad poUtical, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad 
controversial. Well, yes! A one-man show 
— or is it merely the show of one man? 

The only thing that will not be found 
amongst those Figures and Things that have 
passed away will be Conrad ''en pantoufles.'' 
It is a constitutional inabihty. Schlafrock 
und pantoffeln ! Not that! Never! I don't 
know whether I dare boast like a certain South 
American general who used to say that no 
emergency of war or peace had ever found him 
"with his boots off " ; but I may say that when- 
ever the various periodicals mentioned in this 
book called on me to come out and blow 
the trumpet of personal opinions or strike the 
pensive lute that speaks of the past, I always 
[1741 



"NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS" 
tried to pull on my boots first. I didn't want 
to do it, God knows ! Their Editors, to whom 
I beg to offer my thanks here, made me perform 
mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. 
Well, yes! Bribery. What can you expect.^^ 
I never pretended to be better than the people 
in the next street and even in the same street. 

This volume (including these embarrassed 
introductory remarks) is as near as I shall 
ever come to deshabille in public ; and perhaps 
it will do something to help towards a better 
vision of the man, if it gives no more than a 
partial view of a piece of his back, a little 
dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little 
bowed, and receding from the world not be- 
cause of weariness or misanthropy but for 
other reasons that cannot be helped: because 
the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks 
with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you 
must have observed in the ticking of the hall 
clock at home. For reasons like that. Yes! 
It recedes. And this was the chance to afford 
one more view of it — even to my own eyes. 

The section within this volume called 
Letters explains itself though I do not pre- 
tend to say that it justifies its own existence. 
It claims nothing in its defence except the 
[175 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO 

right of speech which I beheve belongs to every- 
body outside a Trappist monastery. The part 
I have ventured, for shortness' sake, to call 
Life, may perhaps justify itself by the emo- 
tional sincerity of the feelings to which the 
various papers included under that head owe 
their origin. And as they relate to events 
of which everyone has a date, they are in the 
nature of sign-posts pointing out the direction 
my thoughts were compelled to take at the 
various crossroads. If anybody detects any 
sort of consistency in the choice, this will be 
only proof positive that wisdom had nothing 
to do with it. Whether right or wrong, 
instinct alone is invariable; a fact which 
only adds a deeper shade to its inherent 
mystery. The appearance of intellectuahty 
these pieces may present at first sight is 
merely the result of the arrangement of words. 
The logic that may be found there is only the 
logic of the language. But I need not labour 
the point. There will be plenty of people 
sagacious enough to perceive the absence of 
all wisdom from these pages. But I believe 
sufficiently in human sympathies to imagine 
that very few will question their sincerity. 
Whatever delusions I may have suffered from 
f 1761 



"NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS" 

I have had no delusions as to the nature of the 
facts commented on here. I may have mis- 
judged their import: but that is the sort of 
error for which one may expect a certain 
amount of toleration. 

The only paper of this collection which has 
never been published before is the Note on the 
Polish problem. It was written at the request 
of a friend to be shown privately, and its 
"Protectorate" idea, sprung from a strong 
sense of the critical nature of the situation, 
was shaped by the actual circumstances of the 
time. The time was about a month before 
the entrance of Roumania into the war, and 
though, honestly, I had seen already the 
shadow of coming events I could not permit 
my misgivings to enter into and destroy the 
structure of my plan. I still believe that 
there was some sense in it. It may certainly 
be charged with the appearance of lack of 
faith and it lays itself open to the throwing 
of many stones; but my object was practical 
and I had to consider warily the preconceived 
notions of the people to whom it was implicitly 
addressed and also their unjustifiable hopes. 
They were unjustifiable, but who was to tell 
them that.^^ I mean who was wise enough and 
[177 1 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 
convincing enough to show them the inanity 
of their mental attitude? The whole atmos- 
phere was poisoned with visions that were 
not so much false as simply impossible. They 
were also the result of vague and uncon- 
fessed fears, and that made their strength. 
For myself, with a very definite dread in my 
heart, I was careful not to allude to their 
character because I did not want the Note to 
be thrown away unread. And then I had to 
remember that the impossible has some- 
times the trick of coming to pass to the con- 
fusion of minds and often to the crushing of 
hearts. 

Of the other papers I have nothing special 
to say. They are what they are, and I am 
by now too hardened a sinner to feel ashamed 
of insignificant indiscretions. And as to their 
appearance in this form I claim that indul- 
gence to which all sinners against themselves 
are entitled. 

1920, J. C. 



178] 



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